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Agriculture and Its Kduca-
tional Needs

BY

ANDREW SLOAN DRAPER, LL.D.

Commissioner of Education, State of New York

SYRACUSE, N. Y. Tay," 9
C. W. BARDEEN, PUBLISHER oh

190 iy
ei

This address was delivered December 29,
1908, before the State Educational Associ-
ation at Syracuse, and is printed with the
speaker’s permission and revision.

AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCA-
TIONAL NEEDS

We are trying very hard in New York
to bring the work of our schools to the
support of our industries.

A year ago when I discussed the relations
of public schools to the mechanical indus-
tries, I observed that the reasoning would
be different as to the agricultural industries
because the situations are unlike, and that
I would take up that theme at some future
time. I turn to it now.

The success of the farmer depends upon
balanced character, love of the earth and
of life in the open, knowledge of his farm
and the ability to make some scientific

applications, practical experience, a grasp
5

6 Agriculture and Its Needs

of market conditions, sound relations with
railroads, in planning, and aggressiveness
good business methods, more than upon
expertness in craftsmanship. The farmer
is his own capitalist. In New York we
had 226,000 farms in 1900. They aver-
aged almost exactly one hundred acres to
the farm. Quite 200,000 of them were
operated wholly or in part by the owners.
There was little room for capital to dictate
Hardly any other man has the earning ca-
pacity of so much property dependent upon
his personal attributes as the farmer. The
mechanic’s equipment is in his skill of hand
and in his not expensive tools if he works
by himself, or in a plant owned by others if
he works in a factory. In either case
he may move readily. The farmer’s
equipment is in his farm and in his trained
and dependable judgment. He is very
much a fixture wherever he is.

Agriculture and Its Needs 7

In the mechanical industries men live and
think and plan and work collectively. They
go out much of nights: they associate in or-
ganizations easily. In the agricultural
industries men live and work very individ-
ually. They come to conclusions and
carry out plans by themselves. In the
cities, centralized capital on the one hand,
and the leaders of labor organizations on
the other, struggle with each other, to the
frequent disadvantage of both. There
much depends upon others. The farmer
controls a considerable property, and the
responsibility of prosperty or penury is
very largely upon himself. With both the
farmer and the mechanic the personality is
of overwhelming importance, but the con-
ditions give the individuality of the farmer
larger opportunities and make his success
or failure more notable. Essentially the
farmer lives at home. The family life is

8 Agriculture and Its Needs

by itself. The work is at home. The
family all have part in it. There is less
mingling with fellow craftsmen and with
the men and women of other crafts.
Trades unionism is absent. The black-
list and the boycott are almost un-
known. The farmer is both a capitalist
and a laborer. If there are combinations
to control the prices of labor, they will not
hold together; and if there are combinations
to control the prices of products, they are
made by manipulators who get the advan-
tages. It all makes so distinct a manner
of life that it must create instrumental-
ities and policies of its own.

We live in an industrial democracy.
We are to work out our political freedom
and our political theories in our politics,
our religion, our education, and our in-
dustries. People are to do what they can
for themselves. What can only be done

Agriculture and Its Needs 9

in combination and through the use of com-
mon power may be done in that way so
long as the fundamental equality of right is
preserved. With this simple limitation,
the State must aid all of its industries.
And the manner of its aid must be specific,
and the measure of it must regard the sig-
nificance of the industry.

New York Agricultural Conditions

In days when the term ‘agriculture’
embraced everything pertaining to the
farm; when all there was of agriculture was
“‘practical’’; when we were almost wholly
an agricultural people; when there were no
glittering and gilded cities to allure the
youth, and no railroads to carry them there ;
when our tillable lands were as potential
as any which had been broken; when the
farm raised all it needed, gloried in its in-
dependence, and was the attractive abid-
ing place of its youth; and when a simple

10 Agriculture and Its Needs

school in co-operation with a simple and yet
noble civilization sufficed to meet the es-
sential needs of a virile people, New York
was the first agricultural state of the Union.
All that is much changed. You will not
ask me to weary you with the details, avail-
able to all, which would prove an obvious
fact. Taking our wheat, corn, oats, barley,
rye, and buckwheat together, we have less
in acreage and are producing less in quan-
tity than forty years ago. The total value
and the average value of lands, buildings,
implements, machinery and livestock are
less than thirty years ago. We have come
to be the first manufacturing siate of the
Union. Our agriculture has not advanced
with our manufactures. In the cereals
other states, for sufficient reasons, have
forged ahead of us, and it seems to me that
we have not recouped where we might.

I have much in common with the prac-
tical farmer; J join him in his amusement

Agriculture and Its Needs 11

over ‘“‘gentlemen farmers’, but remind
him that he ought not to begrudge them
the pleasure they get out of it, nor be un-
speakably cut up about the money they
spend in the country. I am with him in
his contempt for “‘scientific’’ farming
which will not work, but I remind him that
there is much scientific farming which
will work, with his practical help; and
that his practical experience will not
accomplish a great deal without scientific
help.

The situation in general, doubtless, is
that agriculturally we are worse off than
thirty or more years ago, and alittle better
off than ten or fifteen years ago. Relative-
ly we have lost much ground in many lines,
and gained ground in a few. The respon-
sibility for some of the losses is outside of
ourselves. But, while we could not avoid
some losses, we have developed new situ-

12 Agriculture and Its Needs

ations and new demands out of which we
might have made our losses more than
good. We have started towards doing it,
but we have not done it. It is not enough
to give thanks that we are not worse off
than we are. We must lay hold of the
forces that will make us better off than we
are and perhaps better off than we
ever were. Those forces lie in scientific
knowledge and in combined action,—not
combined action which merely complains
and tries to make other people pay for our
losses, but combined action which will do
things that we can not either of us do alone,
and which will make it easier for the man
who has juice and generosity and force in
him to prosper above other men, and which,
on the whole, will enable New York agri-
culture to come to its own again. Admit-
tedly, there are some conditions that are
against it, but there are more new condi-

Agriculture and Iis Needs 13

tions which are in favor of it. If we can
get the sentiment of the State in the way of
reasoning that the government of New
York should do as much for agriculture as
for any other interest—or even a little
more, and if we will lay hold of accumu-
lated knowledge and apply it, and if we
will organize a system of education which
will support it, the somewhat heavy task
may in time be accomplished.

Our Natural Advantages

There are natural advantages in our fa-
vor of which we are either unmindful or to
which we give no fair value. Take for ex-
ample the hills, the woods, the rocks, and
the streams, the materials for building and
for roads, the topographical, climatic, es-
thetic, healthful, and moral factors con-
nected with them. I have lived for ten
years in the Middle West upon a prairie
where one could see the headlight of a loco-

14 Agriculture and Its Needs

motive for twenty-five miles. The soil is
deep and black, without a stoneinit. The
people generally abhor hills as nature does
a vacuum. If some freak of nature has
formed a knoll, they call it a hill and try to
plane it off. I have seen a fine row of
maples half a mile long cut down because
they lessened the number of rows of corn,
and a man of wealth thought he could not
afford it. The roads are often impassable,
and the cost of hard roads almost prohib-
itive. Farmers live in rubber boots for
months together. The motive for moving
to town is much greater there than here,
and when a farmer lives in town there is
trouble at both ends of his route: at one
end the tenant lets the farm look like
Hardscrabble’s shanty, and at the other
the farmer wants to keep a horse, and cow,
and pig, and chickens, to the annoyance
of his neighbors, and does what he can to

Agriculture and Its Needs 15

avoid the cost of walks and pavements and
sewers and electric lights. It is all natural
enough, and only proves that the farmer
is likely to be happier, and other people
happier too, when he makes his farm an at-
tractive and productive place and lives
upon it. During my residence in Illinois,
the farm lands in all the region advanced in
price from about $60 to about $200 per
acre. The regular crops of corn and oats
make very sure returns of eight or ten per
cent upon the latter valuation. The farm-
ers are rational, and intense about making
money, and all have bank accounts. But
you do not have to get as much income out
of land that you can buy for $25 per acre,
as out of land that is worth $200 per acre,
in order to make it pay; and the farm houses
and their conveniences and connections are
no better there than here. In New York,
above almost any other state in the Union

16 Agriculture and Its Needs

we have the hills and lowlands, the woods
and streams, the diversity of soil, and the
stimulation of climate, which may easily
make rural life the finest and the noblest
in all the world. If we can adjust the best
kind of education to it all, the great leader
of the states will have no difficulty in in-
definitely maintaining her supremacy.

We have eighteen hundred miles of state
roads. Put end to end they would reach
from New York to Buffalo four times over.
Over eight hundred miles were finished dur-
ing the past year. There are five hundred
more miles of road under contract, and still
another thousand miles awaiting contract.
We have expended less than a quarter of
the $150,000,000 we have agreed to expend.
With the good roads, and the telephones,
and the trolleys, and the daily free deliv-
eries of mails in all sections, the rural diffi-
culties ought to measurably disappear.

Agriculture and Its Needs 17

Rural Life Gaining in Attractiveness

Of course there have been discourage-
ments. It takes brawn, and brains, and
confidence, and contentment, to till our
New York farms. So does real success in
all places and in all work. The weaklings
have to fall down, wherever they are. The
cities have attracted many vigorous and
ambitious young men and women from the
country. Often that has been well. One
is entitled to do what he may love to do,
if he loves to do anything. One is to be
commended for casting his lot where he
will, if he has head enough to think it out
. for himself. Such men carve out success,
and many are heard of in the cities. The
failures are never celebrated and the vol--
ume of them is never known. The farming
gections have, of course, suffered because
of the drift to the cities. There has not
been much return drift. The reasons for

18 Agriculture and Its Needs

it are not hard to find. Those reasons are,
however, beginning to disappear. The
return drift is setting in and scems likely
to be strong in the next generation.

State Sentiment

The thinking of the State has hardly been
balanced in the last decade. We have been
having more solicitude about forest lands
than farm lands, about forest trees than
shade trees or fruit trees, about wild ani-
mals than tame ones, and about trotting
horses than work horses. Last fall we had
serious forest fires, which stirred our con-
cern and aroused our interest. We seemed
to be well provided with men, machinery,
and implements for fighting them. We
have developed a fine sentiment about our
forest preserve. We have created an effi-
cient State Department to look after it.
We have even got something about it in
the Constitution. It is admirable, and we

Agriculture and Its Needs 19

are proud of it. We are protecting our
wild animals. One has to pay for it, and be
disgraced everlastingly, if he has a wild hen
in his larder at any time in eleven months
of the year, if it can be proved that the hen,
when in life, was wild. Just now they are
trying to mulct a man in penalties and
punish him for killing deer that were tame
and that he bred and raised in his own pad-
dock. Last winter the Legislature made it
a misdemeanor for a farmer’s boy to
shoot weasels and woodchucks beyond the
narrow limit of his father’s farm, at any
time of the year, without paying a dollar
for a license to try it. We will not worry
about that: it will eventuate allright. But
insect pests destroy more value in farm
products every year than fires destroy in
value of forest products in a generation.
Our Science Division conservatively esti-
mates that the annual insect destruction to

20 Agriculture and Its Needs

our farm products amounts to $24,000,000.
Eastern Massachusetts has lately had to
fight the gypsy moth, a great destroyer of
shade trees. It is said that in 1907 that
state, in co-operation with the municipal-
ities affected, expended $750,000 to fight
this pest. Now it is added that these little
scoundrels are migrating to the westward
on parallel lines of latitude, and that the
first division has even got as far as Spring-
field, and is advancing upon us with grim
and sullen determination. If they get up
to the New York line, we will be likely to
fight them withresourcesandenergy enough
to make them pale, because we shall be in
comparison with Massachusetts and there
will be some flavor of patriotism and rivalry
about it. But fruit trees are as vital as
forest trees! Hens are as much entitled to
our respectful consideration as partridges!
Jersey cows have as many claims upon us as

Agriculture and Its Needs 21

deer! I recall a saying of Mr. Beecher,
that it was a great pity that people had to
be born in India in order to hear Henry
Scudder, the missionary, preach. Must
we move to the mountains and the woods
and live irregular lives in order to get that
help for our common interests which none
but the State can give?

How to Increase Earnings

There are ways by which our New York
lands can earn more money, and the State
is bound to help find them. Weare not to
do just as other statesdo. We have not the
corn lands of Illinois and Iowa, nor the
wheat lands of Minnesota and the Dakotas.
But we have abundant facilities for pro-
ducing things they can not grow, and we
are close by great markets from which they
are remote. But it would be well if we
could see how much they are ahead of us in
an all-important matter. That is, in the

22 Agriculture and Its Needs

kind of education which they are sustaining
in the applications of scientific knowledge
which bears upon the productivity, and
therefore upon the life and pleasure, of the
farm.

There are two great lines of State policy
which our combined action ought to assure.
We ought to very carefully work them out
in our minds, have them established by law,
follow them persistently, and bide our time.
One concerns a system of education which
is calculated to sustain modern agriculture,
and the other relates to the things which our
combined intelligence and power may carry
directly into all of the agricultural parts of
the State to help the people of readiest wits
who are most disposed to help themselves.

The Rural Schools
I am, of course, far from contending that

all that agriculture needs is to be supplied
by public schools. There are other great

Agriculture and Iis Needs 23

factors in the problem. With agriculture,
as with every other great interest and its
attendant life, there is as much to be reck-
oned with outside as inside of the schools.
But it is not too much to say that agricul-
ture above almost any other great human
or commercial interest now claims the sup-
port of an adequate and comprehensive ed-
ucational system. | \
‘Primary schools alone, no matter how
good, can not supply the education which is
required to make the most of the agricul-
tural industries. The man who says high
schools are unnecessary, in the country or
anywhere else, is behind the times, and as
much out of touch with rational educational
policy as with the spirit of the country in
which he lives. Nor is it going too far to
say that colleges are as vital as high schools
to a system of instruction which will be
equal to the demands of agricultural ne-

24 Agriculture and Its Needs

cessity. The first national industry, which
supplies the larger part of the raw material
for our manufactures and produces four
times as much in value as our mines and
oil wells together, brings good policy to the
aid of necessity in claiming the support of
a universal system of education. It is not
merely that the farmers’ boys and girls,
like all other American boys and girls, are
entitled to their utmost chance: the nation’s
educational purpose has combined with
situations and the importance of the indus-
try to settle it.

I have discussed many times the improve-
ment of the rural elementary schools and
shall doubtless do it again, but I shall not
og into that now beyond treating of the
factors of an educational system which will
support agricultural needs.

It seems to me that there is not much to
be said in criticism of the rural schools so

Agriculture and Its Needs 25

far as general elementary instruction is con-
cerned. It is true that there is a lack of
grading and an absence of plan by which
pupils may progress from one plane to an-
other and continually look forward to
higher work. But it is also true that the
instruction is more individual, and that all
of the pupils hear all of the instruction and
all of the recitations in all subjects and in
all grades of work. The rural schools are
at least reasonably free from the overcrowd-
ing, the overdoing, and the over-exploita-
tion for all manner of ends that is so common
in the cities. The teaching is by young
women of an average competency which is
now remarkably high, and no one is allowed
to teach without proved competency which
is reasonable. If there could be a uniform
system of supervision by superintendents
who hold or can earn teachers’ certificates,
in districts that are small enough to make

26 Agriculture and Its Needs

actual supervision possible; if such a system
of supervision could be free from all parti-
sanship, and if the supervisory districts
could be arranged so as to have the village
high schools at the centers, and relate all
of the elementary schools to them in a way,
there might be a universal system of schools
for teaching elementary English branches
in the country, quite as well adapted to the
general needs of the conntry as those in the
cities are adapted to those needs of the
cities. And this might all very easily be.
But while the schools of both elementary
and secondary grade in the country are
serving, or may without diffculty be made
to serve the needs of the country in the or-
dinary branches of an English education,
they are doing nothing to train specially
for the vocation of farming. We have ap-
parently come to the imperative need of
training for the industrial vocations in the

Agriculture and Its Needs 27

cities. We have been training for the pro-
fessional vocations for more than a gener-
ation. There is quite as much basis of
_ reason and right in popular education for
the vocation of farming, as for mechanical,
constructive, commercial, and professional
businesses.

The agricultural situation is absolute-
ly distinct from any other industrial
situation, and if it is ever met efficiently it
will have to be met ina very distinct way.
It will never be met by making the agri-
cultural schools of the country primary
schools. The children are too young to want
much agriculture in the elementary schools:
they want English, and mathematics, andthe
elementary sciences there. The primary
children in the cities stand more in need of
agriculture, than the primary children in
the country. The primary schools in both
city and country are all-around schools.

28 Agriculture and Its Needs

Some of the city children will go to the
country: some of the country children will
go tothe city. The education of the coun-
try child is not to be narrowed down to
things rural. His books are not to exclude
illustrations from, and all other recogni-
tion of, rural life, but neither are they to
exclude all else. His primary school is to
be able to train him in the fundamentals of
an all-around man, who will be free from
all exclusiveness, and able to study and do
to the best advantage anything that his
qualities and his tastes may dispose him to
study and to do when the time comes.

We could not establish exclusive agri-
cultural schools of primary grade, even if
we were to get wrong-headed and under-
take it. All schools require balanced work
until the time for specialization comes.
Balanced work requires elements that re-
late to the country as well as those that

Agriculture and Its Needs 29

relate to the cities, and vice-versa. There
are higher laws and fundamental principles
concerning education, and they bear alike
upon all parts of the country and upon all
manner of people. If we violate these laws
or break these principles, the people soon
come to realize it and trouble is, as it ought
to be, let loose upon us.

We have heard much about nature study.
I recognize its value. I intend no offence
to those who have much pleasure init. It
is good. But it is equally good for all
children, as cutting paper, and weaving
mats, and moulding clay, and the like, are
good for all children. All of these things
make for all-around culture, for all-around
outlook, and for all-around love for work
and for facility in doing. Nature study is
quite likely to appeal less to the country
child than to the city child for obvious
reasons, and, while it is to be encouraged

30 Agriculture and Its Needs

in the country as in the city, it apparently
has about the same relation to real agri-
culture that sloyd has to laying out an elec-
tric plant for a city, or laying down the
keel for a battle-ship. In other words, it
is a good thing—a good thing everywhere,
because it helps mould the character of boys
and girls and keeps the way open for what
may come after, but calling it agricultural
instruction will not increase its importance
so much as it will confuse some minds and
subject us to the criticism that we are not
doing what we proclaim.

We are asked to encourage the teaching
of agriculture in the elementary schools.
I am for doing it so far as is. practically
possible. I admit, however, that I am
at a loss to know what are the phases
of real agriculture which are adaptable
to the primary schools, or how to in-
stall them in ways that will dispose children

Agriculture and Its Needs 31

to become interested in them. I know of
many things which look to quickening and
dignifying the different agricultural indus-
tries, in which the children of farmers are
likely to find interest and which are not
incompatible with the plan and purpose of
the elementary schools, and I am for intro-
ducing them into the course of study; but
I confess that I am unable to see the reason-
ableness or the practicability of teaching real
agriculture, any more than engineering or
medicine in the elementary schools. Ag-
riculture is not an elementary subject.

We are asked to have the normal schools
train teachers of agriculture for the ele-
mentary and secondary schools. Some of
the normal school teachers know something
about some of the sciences that are funda-
mental to agriculture, and some of them
know something about some of the prac-
tical methods of farming, although I suspect

32 Agriculture and Its Needs

that not many of them would claim over-
much. The fact is that nine-tenths of the
students in the normal schools who will ever
teach at all are girls. It is so, and doubt-
less it will continue to be so. Ambitious
men who go beyond the high schools are
going to the colleges. And the gods of the
Greeks, mean and sordid as they were,
would laugh at the spectacle of girl teach-
ers training farmers’ boys old enough to
receive it, in the intricacies of real agricul-
ture. Generations will come and go before
there is any substantial result to agricul-
ture through the girls in the normal schools.

In the last year or two the State has
made appropriations to establish three sec-
ondary schools of agriculture. This has
been in response to a general sentiment
in favor of agricultural education, made
without very full consideration of the true
relations which education must sustain to

Agriculture and Its Needs 33

agriculture in order to be effectual, and
without any definite general plan about
agricultural education in New York. These
schools will be of little avail to education,
unless they are made a part of the educa-
tional system, and they will not be of much
ultimate service to agriculture unless they
are made to articulate with schools below
and schools above them; and it will be well,
before we go further, to thresh out the
whole subject and determine upon a plan
which will be comprehensive enough to be
worthy of the State and of real worth to its
agriculture and all of its other interests.
Wholly aside from the absence of plar
about where we are going or where we are
coming out, it is a very open question
whether it will be well for the Stateto set up
a few schools of a secondary grade in agri-
culture, or whether weshould expect counties
or townships to do it, or whether we should

34 Agriculture and Its Needs

develop agricultural instruction in the ex-
isting high schools. The Education De-
partment has been multiplying and en-
larging agricultural subjects in the academ-
ic syllabus for the village high schools,
and we are to be guided somewhat by the
ultimate policy of the State in the premises.
The high schools, unlike the elementary
schools, are upon an educational grade
where the fundamentals of agriculture are
quite practicable, and where the pupils are
old enough to begin to have some real in-
terest in the subject. Without discussing
that, the interests of the State in general,
and of agriculture in particular, clearly call
for discussion and for a plan of procedure
to the end that time, effort, and money be
not wasted and substantial results indefi-
nitely delayed.

It has not been the American plan to
segregate instruction and students—cer-

Agriculture and Its Needs 35

tainly it has not beentheplan where circum-
stances have not compelled it. The
strength of the universities has been in-
creased by the very coordination of their
colleges, the strength of teachers and the
potentiality of teaching has been enhanced
by association with other teachers and
other teaching; and the efficiency of stud-
ents has been promoted by contacts with
other subjects and with other students than
those within the limitations of their own
particular subject and their own particular
class. It has not been common anywhere
in the country to establish state schools
below the college grade except for defect-
ives or dependents, unless in association
with a large and comprehensive institution
ana it is not too much to say that no school
of agriculture in this or in any other coun-
try has become markedly successful which
was not associated with a real university

36 Agriculture and Its Needs

or had not become in fact, if not in name,
a rea! university itself. And I am bound
to look with some regret upon any New
York policy which would put students
of agriculture in an enclosure by them-
selves and deny to agricultural students
the associations with other students which
their interests imperatively demand.

There are practical as well as education-
al difficulties. For example, the courses
at these schools will have to be progressive
and extend over a term of years in order to
have any respectable result; and unless
their number is to be indefinitely extended
—unless, for example, there shall be at
least one in every county—students will
have to be separated from home and live
at these schools for terms, semesters, and
years together. The break with the home
will have to be practically as complete as it
‘is with college students. And the break

Agriculture and Its Needs 37

will have to come before the college age.
The State will probably not multiply these
schools to the number of forty or sixty, and
the interests of the home, of the pupils, and
of the schools, will hardly suffer the separ-
ation from the home before the college age.
Then why not do the best we can for agri-
culture and for farmers’ boys and girls, as
for all scientific subjects and for all voca-
tional training, in the existing local high
schools, and when pupils are able and dis-
posed to go away from home to school,
prepare them for college and send them
to an adequate college and have the
benefit of it? And, looking at the other
side of it, why enter upon or pursue a
policy which must make the public high
school in the smaller villages merely a
preparatory school for the literary col-
leges? These high schools are the peo-
ple’s colleges. Why enter upon a course

38 Agriculture and Iis Needs

which will weaken them on the liter-
ary and scientific side, and withhold the
aid which they can give to the agricultural
side better than any schools which are
likely to be established? Why begin to
exclude from them the things which are
and must continue to be the widest popular
concern? Why not determine that the
high schools shall be broadened so that they
will meet every need of all of their consti-
tuents, at least up to the time when pupils
are mature enough to leave home to go
to college? Science and agriculture are
inseparable. Scientific training and re-
search, associated with practical demon-
strations, are the sum and substance of any
real agricultural advance. No one who
has had any experience in organizing a
school of agriculture, with lands and im-
plements and animals for practical demon-
strations, and who knows the difficulties

Agriculture and Its Needs 39

and expense of organization and mainte-
nance, will believe that there will be any
considerable number of such schools estab-
lished and efficiently sustained in this State.
Such as are set up apart from an institution
of higher learning will not be efficient. Nor
if established, will they be largely attended
by pupils of high school age who have to go
far from home. And all around the village
high schools there is already ‘‘practical’’
agriculture in abundance. It is fully up to
the high school plane. Unless there is
extreme care at the point where the ways
are liable to part, there is great danger of.
projecting roads which will lead from,
rather than to, the greatest good, not only
to New York agriculture, but to New York
education as well.

An Agricultural College

No educational system capable of ade-
qutely supporting the agriculture of a State

40 Agriculture and Its Needs

will be complete without an agricultural
college. One with experience in develop-
ing an agricultural college worthy of the
name will know that there will not be many
of these institutions in the same state, no
matter how great the state may be. In
such a college the best scientific training
and the deepest scientific research are im-
perative. If they are not of the best and
the deepest they will be of no avail, and
they can hardly be such apart from the
teachers, the investigators, and the laborato-
ries to be found at a real university. Ata
real agricultural college the most exact and
reliable experiments and demonstrations
are also imperative, and there are both ed-
ucational and financial reasons in abund-
ance why these will not be much dupli-
cated, or often realized apart from a univer-
sity. In all phases of higher education
what is good is not cheap, and what is cheap

Agriculture and Iis Needs 41

is not good. It is no less true—doubtless
it is more true—in the higher study of
agriculture than in any other phase of
advanced education. And the higher
learning is quite as vital to agriculture as to
any other interest of the people. Then, a
real agricultural college, associated with a
true university, is the true policy in this
State, and such a college may be expected
to vitalize whatever is done in connection
with agriculture in the high schools and
whatever has a bearing upon agriculture in
the elementary schools, and it may also be
expected to incite and uplift profitable agri-
cultural operations among the people.
Then, whether or not an erroneous initia-
tive has been given to provision for agri-
cultural instruction of a secondary grade
in this State, we have made no mistake
concerning agricultural teaching of the
college grade.

42 Agriculture and Its Needs

The State has recently built new agricul-
tural college buildings, and provided for
developing a real agricultural college, at
Cornell University. There are those who
ask,—Why has not Cornell, with New
York’s share of the land-grant funds, devel-
oped a real agricultural college before now?
Iam not one of these, because I know some-
thing of the difficulties which have been in
the way. These difficulties have persisted
until now, but happily they are now giving
way. They have related to the scarcity of
competent teachers with enthusiasm in the
subject, to the absence of students who
could matriculate in a college, to the ab-
sence of any actual and intelligent interest
in agriculture on the part of the univer-
sities, and to the absence of any rational
plan of the agriculturists for agricultural
education. The western farmers have had
more value at stake in their farms than we

Agriculture and Iis Needs 43

have, and they have had to be more aggres-
sive; and the measure of influence, if not
of control, which they have had over the
State universities has enabled them to
solve difficulties and find ways for making
agricultural colleges actually serviceable.
Out of it all, the ways to that end are much
clearer there and here than they used to
be. The available funds of Cornell have
all been used in other directions, and if any- |
thing worth while was to be done the State
has had to do it, and I have been very glad
that it has done it and not made the mistake
in agricultural college work at least, of so
scattering its benefactions and its direc-
tions that there would be only indifferent
result.

The Need of Democracy in Agricultural

Education

So far, so good—but that is far from the

sum of the matter. Before any system of

44 Agriculture and Its Needs

higher education can be of any substantial
advantage to farming, it will have to have
its head in a democratic and a sympathetic,
as well as a real, university. Cornell Uni-
versity is a real university. Its ideals and
its scholarship have been high. Its offer-
ings have extended into wide fields, and its
equipment has been measurably sufficient,
But its disposition has never been so demo-
cratic as its management has desired it to
be, or believed that it was, and its sympa-
thy with the agricultural industries has
never been so consuming as to lead it to
rise above the commonplace in things agri-
cultural, or to surmount the real obstacles
to agricultural investigation and instruc-
tion. It is not the fault of a board of
trustees, a president, a dean, or a professor.
The trouble is beyond either. It will never
be cured unless that university becomes the
real instrument of the State, nor until there

Agriculture and Its Needs 45

is a strong factor in the board of trustees
so keenly interested in agriculture that it
will use its power to compel the university
to accomplish the really great agricultural
ends which can be effected in no other way.

In other words, the erection of buildings
for a college of agriculture at Cornell Uni-
sity is not enough to insure much result to
New York agriculture. The gathering of a
faculty, the laying down of offerings, and
the installation of an equipment, are not
enough. That college will not only have
to be as educationally respectable as any
other college in the university, but it will
have to stand in vital and living relations
with every other. No matter how elabor-
ately equipped it may be, it will accomplish
relatively little unless it has the fellowship
and the stimulus of the union of colleges
and graduate schools which we call the Uni-
versity. It will not bear large fruits unless

46 Agriculture and Its Needs

it has to respond to the demand of a real
constituency with large interests, nor until
the purposes of representatives of that con-
stituency who have the intelligence and the
authority to undertake to accomplish par-
ticular things have to be met.

All of the natural sciences,—physics,
chemistry, zoology, physiology, bacte-
riology, embryology, thermatology; the
social and political sciences, history, eco-
nomics, the mechanical arts, and divers
phases of engineering; great practical ex-
perience, and a large amount of horse sense,
are inseparably involved in that high agri-
cultural development which must be had in
the State of New York if her agriculture
is to keep pace with the other commercial
and intellectual activities of the State. Of
course, not all the people engaged in farming
can be equipped with all of this knowledge,
but a considerable part of them must be to

Agriculture and Iis Needs 47

the end that they may lead the way, and
when such men lead the way all the rest
will be copying larger men and better meth-
ods than they have sufficient opportunity
to copy now. And there must be a place
which will not only initiate new undertak-
ings and lift old ones to higher planes, but
a place to which any occult difficulty may
be taken for investigation and report. And
investigation and teaching, scientific re-
search and the training of teachers and
superintendents, must go together because
one is as vital as the other, and each inspires
and energizes the other. And with it all
there must be, in the agricultural college
- at least, the ever-present feeling that agri-
culture is our most important business, and
that the college which can quicken it has a
larger mission and is entitled to a fuller
reward than any other kind of a college
which the ingenuity of man and the gener-

48 Agriculture and Iis Needs

osity of a people have ever been able to put
upon its feet. These specifications call for
nothing short of a real university under
some considerable measure of popular
control.

Things Outside of the Schools

There are things to be done in the inter-
ests of New York agriculture, outside of the
schools. There need be no squeamishness
about doing them. There need be no hes-
itation about asking the State to do them
when only the State can do them. It is
clearly within the scope of the political
power of the people to promote an
overwhelming common interest by com-
bined action when it can not be done in-
dividually. It is unmistakably so when
the people acting together actually do so
much to enlighten the political and profes-
sional life and culture of the State, and
when they do so much to support so many

Agriculture and Its Needs 49

of the commercial interests of the people.
After all that has been done in many other
directions, agriculture need not hesitate:
and others need not sneer, when agricul-
ture ventures and asks.

For example, we ought to have a com-
petent and complete agricultural survey
made of all the farming lands of this
State. The farmers ought to be told
rather closely of the general attributes
of the soil of the different counties and
of its chemical elements as well. They
should be told, in a general way but
with some particularity and definiteness,
how it may be used to the best advan-
tage. One may say that they do know.
Certainly they know much about it, but if
the subject were to be intensively inquired
into they would themselves be surprised at
the number of things which have not yet
occurred tothem. Quite as certainly there

50 Agriculture and Its Needs

are some things which common usage shows
that many of them do not realize. They
should be told of the additions which are
needed to restore what has been taken out,
or to adapt it to the demands of new situa-
tions. They should not have to take this
from commercial corporations that are sel-
ling fertilizers. They should not go on
putting on stuff that contains nitrogen and
no phosphorus, when what the ground needs
is phosphorus and not nitrogen. They
should not go on selling products contain-
ing constituents that the soil requires, when
they are worth more to keep than to sell.
The common belief among farmers, that
mere rotation of crops rests and recuperates
the soil, is doubtless fallacious beyond the
fact that some crops do not deplete soil as
rapidly as othersdo. What has been taken
out, what needs to be restored, should be
declared by competent authority acting for

Agriculture and Its Needs 51

and responsible to the farming interests.
What may be profitably grown, having in
view the factors in the soil, and the facil-
ities for changing those factors, and the new
facilities for transportation, and the new
demands of the markets, ought to be assert-
ed by undoubted authority. For example,
again, if four-fifths of all of the farm
animals in New York State were to be
destroyed by some noxious disease, it
would seem a great hardship, but if the
pest would discriminate in favor of the
one-fifth which it spared the fact would
in the end be a real gain. We are
continuing the propagation of great
herds of mongrel animals which are com-
monly less serviceable than those which we
might breed, and which often are not
worth their keep. We fall far short of pro-
ducing thebest horsessufficient forourneeds,
either for all-around or particular service.

52 Agriculture and Its Needs

Every farm ought to have at least one new
colt every spring. He should have a ped-
igree that he could be as proud of asa
Son of the Revolution or a member of the
Mayflower Society. He should not be ex-
pected to trot a mile in less than three min-
utes, but by the time he is four years old
he should be worth at least three hundred
dollars and create a sort of savings bank
account for his owner. We are the first
dairy state in the Union, but we have much
to learn about milk cows and scientific
dairying before we can be the first dairy
country in the world. Of course, we have
some fine dairy herds, and of course we
have some up-to-date dairymen, but do any
of us doubt that we have hundreds of thous-
ands of dairy cattle which are too mean to
keep, or that the very common practices of
handling dairy products are alike a menace
and a disgrace to us? Ample knowledge

Agriculture and Its Needs 53

upon the subject is available, and the real
prosperity and pleasure of dairying, as well
as the common safety of the people, depend
upon observing it. Why not have the
State make it known and compel us all to
observe it? Indeed, why not have the
State propagate the most desirable and
profitable animals of the farm, and actually
aid farmers in propagating such for them-
selves? There are a half dozen German
states which have more money invested in
buildings and grounds for a veterinary
college alone, than the State of New York or
its people have invested in veterinary sci-
ence since the Mohawk began to pour into
the Hudson. The Imperial Government of
Japan has recently been studying the mat-
ter of hens, and, with its customary habit
of taking care, has just sent two trusted
representatives to England to select the
best specimens of two breeds which it has

54 Agriculture and Its Needs

decided are best adapted of any in the world
to the needs of Japan. Why did they not
take American hens? Doubtless because
they found that all chickens look much
alike to most Americans. ‘The proof of our
indifference to domestic chickens is cum-
ulative. Yet our State has $15,000,000 in-
vested in poultry, and there is as much
difference in the individuality, and the pro-
ductivity, and the respectability, and the
value, of hens, as there is in horses, or cattle,
or sheep, or swine, or people. This is an
ideal State for first-class chickens and
plenty of them, and why should we permit
ourselves to be the seventh state in the
Union when it comes to such attractive
and money-making creatures of the farm?
We smile about it, but other peoples make
them the subject of governmental care.
Then there are the other large matters of
small fruits, and vegetables, and flowers,

Agriculture and Its Needs 55

for the markets. Here and there one gets
rich through the discriminating propaga-
tion of one or the other, but most of us
seem to blindly suppose that they are whol-
ly dependent upon their own spontaneity,
and that there is nothing to do but to leave
them to nature and to chance. Yet there
are other states and other nations which
see that it is worth more than it costs to
make each of them the subject of the in-
vestigations and the teachings of a distinct
department of a university. Then there is
the vital subject of horticulture in its larger
aspects, with its infinite claims and its
unspeakable possibilities. The apples,
pears, grapes, and nuts; the forests, the
shade trees, all phases of landscape archi-
tecture and gardening, demand the over-
sight and the leadership and the aid of the
State on both the scientific and practical
sides. Yet again, there is the still larger

56 Agriculture and Its Needs

subject of the homemaking, with its archi-
tecture and sanitation, the matter of deco-
rations, the comforts and conveniences,
with the adaptation of foods to the family
needs, and the thousand things which with
attention will make the life of the mother an
easier one, and the possibilities of the chil-
dren different and greater than they other-
wise would be. And right there is the
overwhelming consideration to which all
others must be contributory, and before
which every other pales into insignificance,
and that is the public need of knowing that
boys and girls are the first concern of a
State; the public obligation to do the mate-
rial things which will dispose every farm boy
and farm girl to look upon farming not for
the sake of the farm more than for their
own sake, not as repellent drudgery, but
as the high grade business that it is.

All these things are outside of the schools,
but they have to proceed from the prev-

Agriculture and Its Needs 57

alent system of education and they all
relate back to the schools. In a word,
from which there can hardly be any dissent,
the prosperity and the pleasure of a great
industry depend upon the completeness,
the symmetry, and the co-operative effi-
ciency of the parts of the educational sys-
tem which enter into its details and give
rationale and character to it as a whole.
And in another word, from which I do not
expect dissent, the states which lay the
most emphasis upon those phases of learn-
ing which bear directly upon the mechan-
ical and agricultural industries, and which
carry them right to the homes of the people,
will enjoy the largest commercial prosper-
ity and will have the happiest and the
strongest populations.
New York Behind in Agricultural
Education

I do not often find myself in the attitude
of a critic of the Empire State, but it must

58 Agriculture and Its Needs

be said that New York is far from the front
in developing policies and establishing in-
strumentalities to aid either the mechan-
ical or the agricultural industries. With
the prestige and the advantage of being an
old state, it would be strange if we did not
suffer some of the disadvantages of it. Let
me point out what the educational disad-
vantages concerning agriculture are, and
why they are, and let us believe that we may
cure them if we will.

The Federal Constitution left, as it was
bound to leave, universities, as all other
schools, to be propagated by the States.
In every state formed after the adoption
of ‘‘the more perfect union”’ the State con-
stitution provided for a system of schools,
and ordinarily for a state university. Ed-
ucation was a universal passion. The
western pioneers had a dreadfully hard
time, but they had the pride and nerve

Agriculture and Its Needs 59

which kept it to themselves. They were
bound to build up new states to rival the
old ones, and they realized that a compre-
hensive educational system was the only
corner stone which such a new State could
have. If they had little to do with, they
were at least fortunate in the fact that there
was nothing in the way. Even public uni-
versities were established in all of the newer
states. The people laid the foundations of
comprehensive educational systems, and
crowned the systems with public univer-
sities. The potential power of all this has
not been realized until the coming of wealth
within the last twenty-five years.
Forty-six years ago the general govern-
ment provided a gift of thirty thousand
acres of land to each state for each senator
and representative in Congress, upon con-
dition that the state would use the proceeds
for the propagation of a university which,

60 Agriculture and Its Needs

without ignoring other branches of liberal
learning, would lay particular emphasis
upon those bearing upon agriculture and
the mechanic arts. The act was passed
after a long struggle. It was passed more
than once. It was vetoed by Buchanan.
It was signed by the great Lincoln. This
act was as epoch making in education as
the Declaration of Independence was in
political progress, or as the Ordinance of
’87 was in the advance of public enlighten-
ment and morality.

The newer states had the larger part in
procuring its passage, and they were the
quickest and the keenest to claim their
rights underit. They had the freer democ-
racy. They were in the pioneer stage.
They lacked nothing in assertiveness.
They wanted all that the older states had,
and much more. Universal education
became speedily a universal passion. Their

Agriculture and Its Needs 61

institutions were yet in the liquid state.
The Federal grant would aid their already
existent state universities, or support
others. They had the system which could
lay hold of the opportunity. Every one
of them managed to comply with the terms
and lay hold upon the grants. Often they
had a hard time complying with the re-
quirements fot rhe twenty-five years fol-
lowing the war, but they held on. Then
the country had filled up. More acres were
put under the plow, and all the acres were
made more productive. Wealth grew.
In the eighties, and still more in the nineties,
land grant institutions had developed more
highly educated constituencies, and, quite
as important, they began to show the people
who were engaged in the commercial, manu-
facturing, transportation, and agricultural
industries, how to make more money.
That settled it. Nothing succeeded like

62 Agriculture and Its Needs

success. They went after more money,
and now each gets $50,000 per year be-
yond the proceeds of the land grants.

And now, again, every one of the newer
states puts into its State University or

land grant college more than it gets from
the Federal grants, and some of them
twenty times as much. They are not fools:
they are more intent than ever on having
all of the education that any state has,
with some to spare; the roads are filled with
the coming and going of students. Ne-
braska and Wisconsin each has a larger
proportion of college students than either
New York or Massachusetts. There are
graduates, and therefore trained agents,.
of the universities in every village and upon
almost every farm, and all the people stand
ready to make further investments where
they will pay. They are not doing it for
mere love. They see that there is money

Agriculture and Its Needs 63

in it. Added to the natural educational
enthusiasm, that concludes matters.

The older states did practically nothing.
They are only now opening their eyes.
Their ignorance of patent facts is as monu-
mental as it is stupid. Of course, the old
order is in the way. It is the habit of the
old order to question the academic quality
of the new order of institutions. One col-
lege president laments that the people put
their hands into the people’s treasury to
promote higher education. Another chal-
lenges the applicability of liberal learning
to the industries. Still another says, as
bluntly as it can be said in classical phrase,
that it is all wrong to educate people out of
their environment. And yet another looks
through spectacles that are befogged with
the literary and philosophical training of
the ages, and stoutly denies that what ac-
tually zs, can be. Itisnot strange. Nei-

64 Agriculture and Its Needs

ther men nor institutions can be made over
in a minute, after they are fifty years of
age. The old order is the persistent ex-
pression of social, political, and educational
aristocracy. The new order is the advance
agent of educational and industrial democ-
racy. The new order is assure to persist as
the Republic is to endure, for it is only the
logical outworking of the democracy of the
nation. It is sure to go in every state, for
the nation will never endure half slave and
half free educationally, any more than
politically.

In New York we are as yet in the old
order. We are not quite so hide-bound as
some who live in the still more educationally
effete East. Some men and some facts
have helped us. But we are a long way
from being out in the clear sunlight. We
almost lost the advantage of the Federal
grants to higher learning for the masses

Agriculture and Its Needs 65

and the industri¢s of the people, and would
have done so absolutely but for Andrew
D. White and Ezra Cornell, both senators
of this State, one a scholar and educational
organizer, who had been a professor in the
State University of Michigan and the other
an inventor and industrial organizer, a
millionaire, and withal a philanthropist.
Between them, with these qualities, and
being in the Senate, they got up the best
scheme that was practicable under the cir-
cumstances, rescued the grant to New York
from utter failure by providing an endow-
ment and creating an institution which
could take it and try to meet the State’s
obligations concerning it. The State did
nothing. It merely stood by and bene-
volently let the thing be done. The result
was Cornell University. I have never been
quite able to see how the scheme held to-
gether and worked out legally, but I im-

66 Agriculture and Its Needs

agine that, as it cost the State nothing, it
was looked upon with a good measure of
legal and administrative considerateness,
as it certainly deserved to be. By rea-
son of the sagacious location of the State
lands, by other gifts, and by hard strug-
gling, a great and influential university
has grown up on the hillside at Ithaca. By
reason of the circumstances of its origin, of
its imperative legal obligations, and of
the fact that its first two presidents—cov-
ering terms of twenty-four years—were
professors from the University of Michigan,
it partook of the form, of many of the fac-
tors, and of much of the spirit of the state
universities. Because of the scholarships,
and for other reasons, it stands in rather
close relations to our State system of edu-
cation. All honor to the men who have
done it, and to all of the men and
women whose sympathies have entered into

Agriculture and Its Needs 67

it. But it would be idle to say that in any
_ essential way it sustains the relation of
either a State University or an industrial
college to the Empire State. It does not,
and it can not, because it is not under pop-
ular control, and can not be responsive to
the natural impulses of our unfolding poli-
tical and industrial democracy, nor can its
practical ministrations be accepted by the
people as they would be if there were the
sense of public proprietorship in it.

Aids to Wives and Daughters

Up to this time we have been thinking
about the training which essentially relates
to men, and about farming operations out-
side of the house. It would be a mistake
to leave the subject without a word as to
the special training of the women who live
in the country, and as to the education
which enters directly into the making of the
farmer’s home. To accomplish any large

68 Agriculture and Its Needs

results men and women must not only work
together, but they must have equal advan-
tages; they must be equally enthusiastic
and aggressive, and the work of each must
be equally regarded and respected by the
other. There is a lack of such equality of
outlook and opportunity in New York
education. The women have less chance,
not so much special training either in
or out of the schools, not so many
social contacts, not so many implements
to do with, and not so much to stim-
ulate and liberalize their work either within
their own homes or in comparisons between
different homes. Of course there are not-
able exceptions, but we have necessarily
to deal with generalities. Of course, I
intend no reflection upon a class of women
who are as justly entitled to the highest
respect for doing all they do under cir-
cumstances that are often discouraging, as

Agriculture and Its Needs 69

they are entitled to an open educational
chance with the men, which very commonly
they do not get. If the women could be
put in charge of the farm, the operations
would doubtless go quite as well as they
do now, but if the men were to be put in
charge of the house, the better part of them
would either lie down under the burden or
there would be so many changes and so
many new conveniences and fixings and
implements that thetreasury would be bank-
tupted. I am not saying that all of the
fault is with the men, although a good share
of it belongs to some men. I once sat
behind two farmers’ wives through an ad-
mirable cooking demonstration at a county
“domestic science’ association. At the
conclusion one said to the other, “‘I suppose
this thing is all right for these city and uni-
versity women, but I can cook without any
of their help.’”’ Doubtless she could, and

70 Agriculture and Its Needs

quite as doubtless she belonged to a class
who have as much to learn about the most
desirable and economical food supplies, and
the question of nutrition, and the manner of
preparation, and the time for use, and the
manner of serving, as I have to learn about
a million things. And thatis far from all
there isofit. It reaches to the making, the
sanitation, and the decoration of the home,
to the furnishings and conveniences of the
home, to the deep subject of home econo-
nomics and household management, and to
all that most effectually brings the vital
support of the home to the support of the
work upon the farm. It may make the
life of the family something that ambitious
boys and girls will cling to, even something
which, being added to the rational and cor-
dial welcome of their fathers and mothers,
they will be proud to invite their friends to.

In a word, in considering the educational
needs of New York agriculture, the educa-

Agriculture and Its Needs 71

tion, the liberal and special education, of
women claims quite as much as that of men.
There is quite as much necessity of special-
ization for girls as for boys, when the time
for specialization comes. The courses in
the secondary schools, whatever form the
school is to take, are bound to regard the
work of girls as well as that of boys, and
there will be no complete or symmetrical
college of agriculture unless there is asso-
ciated with it a department of household
economy, with the many offerings which go
to the bottom of all the problems of the
household upon the farm. Nor will there
be sufficient result until the need of it is
recognized among the people. And it may
as well be added that when such courses are
provided, there will not be so much result
unless girlscan go and take them with justas
much independence, and security, and com-
mon respect as any boy upon the grounds.

72 Agriculture and Its Needs

If this can not be until boys are taught
some lessons, the date of entering upon that
process ought not to be long postponed.

Suggestions

In summary, I submit the following sug-
gestions concerning the educational basis
of the agricultural industries:

There should be a complete and
inter-related system of schools, elementary,
secondary, and higher, open to all, and es-
sentially under the control of the people of
the State.

The elementary school should be
within reach of every farmer’s home. So
long as the school is adequately sustained
and competently taught, the location may
be left to the people of the district. It is
more a question of expediency than of ed-
ucational principle, and there is no balance
of advantages in school concentration to

Agriculiure and Its Needs 73

justify forcefully overthrowing an estab-
lished order.

The elementary schools are to teach
the elements of an all-around English edu-
cation. They can not specialize much, and
they are not to be in any sense exclusive.
They are to aim at fitting children for the
choice of any vocation they may prefer and
for beginning the preparation therefor.
They are always to preach the gospel of
work, and to use books, objects and meth-
ods to stimulate quite as much interest—
and in the country perhaps more interest —
in agriculture as in any other industry.
This should be guarded in making the ele-
mentary syllabus. The work of the ele-
mentary schools in the country as in the
cities, should not dawdle and waste time
through the multiplicity of books and the
idle exploitation of pedagogical theories
and methods. It should be definite quan-

74 Agriculture and Its Needs

titively, as well as efficient qualitively.
The attendance laws should be enforced in
the country as in the cities, even though
the extent of child labor upon the farm and
the distance of the school makes neglect of
the law very frequent and the difficulties
of enforcement very great. The course
should be simplified and shortened, and the
child brought to the end of it, with the as-
surance that he has some definite knowl-
edge and measure of efficiency, by the time
he is fourteen yearsof age. Better profes-
sional supervision should establish somesat-
isfactory basis of graduation from a country
elementary school, and graduation should
qualify the pupil for admission to the high
school, or a district agricultural school.
There should be an approved high
school within driving distance of every
home. In this school there must be pro-
vision for an all-around high school train:

Agriculture and Iis Needs 75

ing which will fit for college or technical
school, and there should be a distinct cleav-
age in the interest of agriculture where
pupils will elect it. Where there is suffi-
cient demand for it to justify a distinct
agricultural school of secondary grade, ona
parallel with the trades schools which we
are beginning to organize in the cities, and
such course can be taken without weaken-
ing the established high schools, as it may
be in the cities, argument will go some way
to support a distinct agricultural as well as
a distinct trades school; but I never expect
to concede that agriculture does not rest
upon a broader basis than mechanics, and
that the management of a farm does not
exact a wider field of knowledge than the
training of workmen. Whether special
training in agriculture be carried on in the
established high schools or in distinct
schools is largely a matter of expediency

76 Agriculture and Its Needs

and convenience. Let it be done in the
neighboring village high school, or in a
distinct school to be developed by a com-
bination of districts or towns, or possibly
by all the towns of a county, or wherever
it promises to be most convenient and best.
But, wherever done, it must train both boys
and girls, and expect that they will live at
home. The work must be fundamental
to agriculture, that is, it must teach the
natural sciences, something of economics,
much of common business usage, and a
great deal of the simpler phases of agrono-
my, horticulture, floriculture, vegetable
culture, animal husbandry including dairy-
ing, home making, or anything else con-
nected with the industries of the farm, so
long as it can be done with the facilities
which are practicable in such a school, with
the life of the home, and all the surrounding
environment for illustration and experiment.

Agriculture and Its Needs 77

But the general training should go far
enough to largely relieve the student from
the study of the English branches if he goes
to the agricultural college. It is of a grade
which may be quite as well done in the local
school, and the student should not be sent
to the college so deficient in the ordinary
English branches as to make it necessary
for the college to devote so much time to it
to the exclusion of work in technical agri-
culture. And the technical agriculture in
the high school should count as much as any
other in credits, and also for admission to
the agricultural college for those who will
be disposed to go.

It would have been better if we
could have well considered, and could have
reached definite conclusions concerning
schools of agriculture of secondary grade,
before any of such schools was attempted
by the State. Certainly others should not

78 Agriculture and Its Needs

be provided for unless after full consider-
ation and upon some well understood plan.
If the established schools are not to under-
take this work, and the State is to do it
directly, and there are to be forty or sixty
of these schools, and if they are to meet
real educational standards, then there is
little to regret. If not, and if some agri-
cultural work is to be done in the present
high schools, and if a small number of these
State schools can be firmly established
between the existent high schools and the
agricultural college, they might justify their
cost. But there are difficulties in the way.
It is likely to be hard enough for them to
secure enough intending agricultural stu-
dents and provide enough real agricultural
instruction to justify their cost, when they
are associated with a college or university,
as at St. Lawrence and Alfred. It is quite
possible, however. It will prove impossible

Agriculture and Its Needs 79

for one which is wholly independent of a
college to do that, unless the State is to
make a college, and not a high school, of it;
and that would mean an expense which has
not been thought of, and a rival to the State
college at Cornell which has not been intend-
ed. It has been suggested that the pro-
posed school at Morrisville which is as yet
wholly unorganized, be transferred to
Colgate University, an excellent institu-
tion which is but five or six miles away, and
the suggestion seems worthy of serious con-
sideration. It might be held to be un-
thinkably cruel for the State to wholly
recall any institution of this kind which it
had once agreed to provide, and I would be
glad enough if the State would establish
such a school at every college in the State
which would be strengthened by, or be
hospitable to it, if, after discussion, it
should be thought well to make that the

80 Agriculture and Its Needs

general plan. But the State education-
al system would like to know what the ed-
ucational policy of the State concerning
secondary instruction in agriculture is to be.

It will be good State policy to give
liberal support to the State College of Agri-
culture and expect to make large demands
upon it. An agricultural college is bound
to be a college as much as any other kind of
institution which claims the name of
college. Strong teachers and many offer-
ings will have to precede the coming of
students. Nostate will be likely to support
more than one that will make much of an
impression upon its agriculture. The
offerings must be largely in agricultural
technique. The equipment should be even
larger in fields and barns and herds, than in
libraries and laboratories, because the stu-
dent should have a reasonable English
education before he goes to college, and

Agriculture and Its Needs 81

because when an agricultural college has
the large advantage of being a college in a
university, it may count much upon the
privileges which are common to all. By
the time one who is to live on a farm goes
away from home to an agricultural college,
it is time he was given his fill of agricultural
instruction that is actual and real. Buta
real college, properly sustained by the
schools below, will gather students who can
matriculate and thus make an impression
upon the State which will endure. The
State Agricultural College must be sensi-
tive to rational and responsible agricultur-
alinitiative. It must not only train men to
manage farms, but it must train teachers:
for agricultural work in the schools below.
It must be scholarly, butit must be as demo-
cratic as it is scholarly. There are people
who think that impossible. Therein lies
the difference between the old academic

82 Agriculture and Its Needs

scholarship and the newer industrial schol-
arship. Other states have found that
difference and reckoned with it more than
once. We can beat them all if we will.
The State Agricultural College must not
only be sensitive to the initiative of others,
it must have an initiative of its own. It
must find out the things which New York
agriculture needs to have done and go right
ahead doing them, knowing that if they
work it will get the glory, and if they fail
it will be damned for it. Teaching and
research must go together. They always
help one another. The State College of
Agriculture and the United States and New
York State Agricultural Experiment Sta-
tions are bound to supplement each other.
Ithaca and Geneva are not far apart, and
the roads between them are very pleasant.
Between them they are bound to investi-
gate, supply information, and have an

Agriculture and Its Needs 83

opinion upon every problem a New York
farmer will bring to them, and when they
do it the New York farmers are bound to
listen tothem. They are to supply energy
and guidance to every farmers’ organiza-
tion and every agricultural enterprise. In
theory and in fact they are to assume the
leadership in a great system of education
which adequately supports our fundamen-
tal and our greatest industry.

We should enter upon a great system
of agricultural extension. The schools,
from highest to lowest, should act in accord,
not only in training students, but in carry-
ing knowledge to the very doors of the
farmers. Evangelistic work in agriculture
should go everywhere. Seed specials should
be run over the railroads. The blood of the
best farm animals should be distributed
throughout the State. Object lessons of
special interest to both men and women

84 Agriculture and Its Needs

should be carried in all directions. The
applications should be especially adapted
to every section, and the fullest attention
should be given to the less favored rather
than to the most favored counties of the
State.

I hesitate not a moment in saying that
the State might well send a commission
of practical farmers and trained scientists,
or, perhaps better, a commissioner who is
experienced in farming, informed in eco-
nomics, and trained scientifically, to any
country in the world that seems able to
send us anything in the way of farm pro-
ducts or domestic animals that will be of
advantage to us, with authority to buy,
and directions to learn whatever would be
of advantage to our agriculture. I noticed
in the New York papers of this morning
that New Jersey has just imported fourteen
Percheron and Clydesdale horses to extend

Agriculture and Its Needs 85

the breeding of these magnificent draft
horses among her people. And I know of
another state which has sent one man to
Germany to study veterinary colleges,
another to Denmark to study dairying, and
a third to Argentina to investigate beef
cattle. There are scores of similar sub-
jects which individuals can not exploit
because they do not know what to do, or
are without the money or the inclination
to engage in large undertakings. In such
circumstances it is clearly within the func-
tions of the state to act. There is no
smack of paternalism or socialism about
it. All good governments do it in order
to aid the industries of the people. It
involves no large amount of money, in
view of the sums to which the state is
customed. But it can not be done by agents
who know little about it or who are more
concerned about themselves than about

86 © Agriculture and Its Needs

the enduring interests of a great state.
If honestly and capably done, the senti-
ment of the state would cordially sustain
it. And if it were done through the State
Agricultural College, or the Agricultural
Experiment Station, or one of the State
schools of agriculture, there would be
sufficient assurance that whatever was
undertaken would be scientifically initiated
and well and wisely carried out.

Conclusion

There are perhaps three great fundamen-
tal factors in the distributive wealth of a
State, namely, natural resources, commer-
cial situation, and the intelligence with
which they are made the most of. The
largest factor in natural resources is doubt-
less the tillable soil. We can not claim
that the proportion of our potential soil to
acreage is equal to that of some of the prai-
rie states, but there is no doubt whatever

Agriculture and Its Needs 87

that, with existing farm values, our soil may
be made to yield quite as large a return
upon investment as that of any other state.
Aside from that, nature has been exceed-
ingly kind to us. In the association of ar-
able lands with mountains, and rivers, and
lakes, and forests, and glens, and water-
falls, and with rainfalls and climate, and all
that stimulates the imagination and makes
for the physical and moral health of the peo-
ple, westand second to no Statein the Union.
In the association of all this with commer-
cial situation, we easily have the advantage
of them all. And we will never admit that
we lack the sense or the wits to act together
and make the most of what nature and situ-
ation have done for us.

We have much to demoralize our think-
ing, but we may well remember that the
things in the life of a people which are of
utmost and enduring worth invariably go

88 . Agriculture and Its Needs

back to Mother Earth. Manufactures are
dependent. Importations are uncertain.
We may not always take toll of the com-
merce that comes through both our eastern
and our western doors and is carried over
our highways. Our great metropolitan
city may not always be the clearing house
of the nation’s business, and even though
it is, the profits will continue to go into rel-
atively few hands. Mother Earth will
never forsake and she will never fool us.
Neither will she permit us to trifle with her.
One who can not afford to lose, can not
afford to speculate in uncertain and de-
moralizing cfops any more than in uncer-
tain and demoralizing securities. Nor
can he afford to go on in the way which did
well enough when we were wholly an agri-
cultural people, when children were sea-
soned through doing their share of the work,
when books were few, and when the simple

Agriculture and Iis Needs 89

district school joined with the work of the
farm, to support a simple, but none the less
a noble, civilization. We shall be mis-
guided if we do not continue to abide with
Mother Earth and follow the course which
will continue to make the most of her.

And we shall be a witless as well asamis-
guided people if we do not combine to ascer-
tain from the reports of the markets and
the work of the laboratories what may be
done without much risk, and if we do not
adjust ourselves to the more complex, the
more intelligent, and the better life of our
day in a way which will enable our proper-
ties to get our share out of it. The farm
house will have to have the essential con-
veniences and connections of the city house.
The boys and girls will have to have the
things which they know other boys and
girls have. The young men and maidens
will have to have a good time of it and be

90 Agriculture and Iis Needs

able to find the ways for meeting their
reasonable ambitions. The shorter work-
ing day and all the better conditions of
labor will have to be reckoned with. The
comfort, and the enlightenment, and the
moral betterment of all in the household
will have to be sedulously studied and gen-
erously provided for.

Of course the social, and educational,
and industrial combination will give help
to such as accord with it and are capable
of making use of its advantages, but the
personal equation will have to settle things
upon each farm, and the personal attri-
butes of the individual farmer will have to
prevail. But, while, no matter what the
general level of intelligence and sagacity,
some will fail and complain, and some will
prosper and be happy, yet, there is no
doubt about the public attitudes and the
common undertakings of a people being

Agriculture and Its Needs 91

often vital to the progress of men and
women who deserve to prosper. In this
sense the people and the government of
New York have occasion enough to do
much to widen the door of opportunity to
all of our agricultural industries.

To find the true and sure ways for widen-
ing that door a new body of learning is
quite as necessary as old-time practical ex-
perience in farming. It is no easy task.
Both educationists and farmers will have
to bury their conceits and enter upon the
breaking out of new roads with all modesty
of opinion.

Governor Hughes has given us an admir-
able Commissioner of Agriculture. Liber-
ally and specially educated, in full sym-
pathy with the new spirit of agriculture,
with youth and ambition and yet with con-
siderable experience and undoubted gifts in

administrative lines, the appointment o

92 Agriculture and Its Needs

Mr. Pearson to the headship of the agricul-
tural activities of the State is altogether
timely and encouraging. I am anxious that
the forces which he and I represent shall
work in rational co-operation, and that each
shall bring out the best there is in learning
andin labor. A new system of agriculture
and a new system of education will have to
join forces. Farmers and educationists will
have to join hands in arranging the details
of a new system of education and in making
new plans about work. I am sure we have
all come to the time when we shall be glad
to haveitso. If we have, the rest of it will
not be so difficult after all. Both agricul-
ture and education will be the gainers by it.
Our education will more completely aid
the evolution of our industrial democracy,
and our agriculture will more surely come
into the possession of its own again.

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