pute, but to which no one attaches any special significance. It is proper at this point to inquire what are some of the definite things which the modern farmer needs to know, and which constitute his "Hope" of better progress towards material comfort.

The mechanical operations of the farm are, of course, not referred to, for those the farmers already understand, although those who know most about even them will be the first to concede that they are constantly acquiring helpful information as to operations which they have conducted from boyhood. No farmer of fifty years of age will concede that he has not learned much since he was forty, as to management of soils, methods of drainage, ways of combating pests, desirable varieties of crop plants, treatment of crops in harvesting, the feeding and breeding of stock, and the like, which, taken together, constitute what we call farm practice. He does know more, and part of his increased knowledge has been attained by his own experience, and part by observation of the experience of his neighbors. The ordinary farm practice in different localities is very well understood by those who live in them, and is best learned on the farm itself, if, indeed, it be possible to learn it well elsewhere. Such knowledge, therefore, is assumed to be possessed by the farmer. So long as he is on virgin soils in a growing country with extending markets, it serves his purpose very well.

But the modern farmer does not live under such conditions. He lives, for the most part, upon deteriorated soils in communities which seem to have gotten their growth. There are no longer new settlers coming in to make a home market for produce. It seems harder, for some reason, to get on. The shiftless families whose children once swarmed in the schoolhouses have been gone for years. Where?-No one knows. They are undergoing the process of extinction. Of late years there has been in many neighborhoods another process going on. One by one the small farmers have been "selling out" to the larger farmers adjoining, and these families also have gone. Why did they sell, and where have they gone? These questions are not so easy to answer. Doubtless

in many cases the reasons for selling were founded in the general spirit of unrest which is an American characteristic, and doubtless, also, in many cases they have bettered their condition by so doing. In most cases, however, I suppose they have sold because they found it yearly more difficult to live. The pressure of competition was becoming too strong for them. They needed to know something which their neighbors knew, or they would not have been able to buy. The majority of these families have doubtless started the down-hill road. Finally, of late years, in the newer states there are many who, no longer able to obtain good land by merely settling on it, have purchased at high prices, and run in debt for it. These families are usually paying very slowly for their land, if at all. Interest is eating them up. Plainly there was something which these people could have learned to their advantage.

First of all, the farmer needs to know how to reduce the cost of his products. The prices he can not control. He finds his margin of profit insufficient. His one resource is to reduce costs. The farmer is now only passing through an experience which all other industries have encountered, but from which, until lately, the American farmer has been exempt. The farmer knows that costs of manufactured articles have decreased, because he buys them cheaper. When he inquires how costs have been reduced, he will find that in every instance it is the work of scientific men -mainly engineers and chemists. When he understands this, he should at once be prepared to expect aid from the same source. And he is getting it from that source. The farm-yard fertilizers produced are wholly inadequate to the requirements of many agricultural industries, and commercial fertilizers are bought in enormous quantities. All that we know as to these we have learned from the chemists. The entomologists and botanists have learned the life histories of injurious insects and fungi, and the chemists have compounded the materials for combating them. When the farmer "bluestones" his seed wheat, he is doing merely what some chemist at some time taught some farmer. The mechanical engineer fashions the modern farming implements accord

ing to the unvarying laws of mathematics. The veterinarian and entomologist have located the cause of Texas fever in a parasite which the chemist has taught us how to destroy, as he long since taught us how to eradicate sheep scab. The physicist has learned how soils are formed, has definitely classified them according to the size of their particles, and discovered precisely how water behaves in the different classes. This aids the farmers who understand such things to plant and till crops with better judgment. The meteorologist has iscovered the laws of storms, and learned how to gather data by which he makes the forecasts whereby we save our crops. He is likely, within a generation or two, to correctly foretell wet and dry seasons, and thereby guide us in our planting. The bacteriologist has taught us innumerable things, for example, the ferments which make or mar our butter and cheese, and the organisms which cause infectious diseases of live stock, and, in a great measure, has put them under our control. The biologist has taught us the laws of heredity, and thus enabled us to work intelligently for the improvement of our live stock. The physiologist has taught us the laws of digestion, and enabled us to stop wasting feedstuffs.

It is unnecessary to extend the catalogue of which the above is but the beginning. If we took from the farmer the knowledge which pure science gave him so long ago that it has become part of the inherited information of the ordinary farmer, he would be lost. If we took from the progressive farmer the additional information which he habitually uses, he would produce no more cheaply than his more ignorant brother, who is growing poorer every year, he knows not how. When I was seventeen years old, I went one day to hire out in "haying" to a hard-working farmer who was one of the best men I ever knew. I found him hoeing corn, and faithfully working every inch of the soil between the rows. Many of his neighbors had horse cultivators, but he said he had no faith in them. The hoe was the only tool to be relied on. There were many excellent men of his way of thinking in those days, just as there are now many who have no faith that science can aid them. The horse tool saves money to the

farmer by enabling him to do more work, and perhaps better work, for a given sum of money, thus reducing cost. The bacteriologist saves money to the farmer in enabling him, for example, to avoid raising swine to die of hog cholera, by inoculating them with serum, upon the same principle that he protects his child from smallpox. The object of all applied science is to reduce cost by reducing the labor of production, or protecting the finished or half-completed product.

A portion, then, of the "knowledge" which is the "Hope" of the farmer is the acquaintance, so far as he can possibly obtain it, with whatever science is from day to day discovering of that which will reduce cost of production. Nothing else will enable the farmer to compete with his fellows, and maintain his economic existence. Thrift and industry are assumed. All understand the necessity of those virtues; but industry improperly applied will fail of its reward, and it is only knowledge which enables industry to be wisely directed. It is essential that some portion of the time which the thrifty farmer now devotes to manual labor shall be withdrawn from that and expended in learning how to most wisely employ that labor.

But all this is only one aspect of the case. While the art of production is possessed in some degree by all farmers, very little is known by them of the science of marketing, and the art of maintaining business-like methods is hardly understood at all. In the matter of reducing costs, for example, very few farmers know the cost of anything which they produce. The subject of reducing the cost of a product can only be intelligently approached upon the basis of a record of the details of present costs. It is not necessary to enlarge upon this, for every farmer knows it. He does not keep these records in America, because hitherto he has been able to live without it. A merchant who has no competition within fifty miles need not know his cost very accurately, for his selling prices will be high enough to cover waste, but to the merchant in a busy town every item of cost is essential and is duly recorded. Increasing competition and deteriorating soils make this equally essential to the modern farmer.

But there are other things equally important. At this point, however, it is necessary to draw the distinction between the farmer producing for a special market, like the vegetable grower near a large town, and one producing for the general market, like the wheat grower or the cotton planter. The latter requires far wider knowledge and greater ability. He must be, to succeed, a well-informed business man. It will be well to consider briefly some things which the farmer needs to know as a business man.

In this category I must place, as not only first, but far. more important than all other business information, a knowledge of what his competitor is doing. I was for years connected with manufacturing interests, and the one thing which gave us more concern than anything else was to learn what our competitors were doing. It is the most important thing for any business man to know. It is a matter about which most farmers never think. As a matter of fact, he can not know very accurately what they are doing. The farmer who raises wheat in Illinois can get no more for his product than the farmer in Argentina will sell for. The price for both is determined by the outcome of the competition between the wheat growers of all parts of the world under existing conditions of demand. But while the Illinois farmer can not be fully informed of the factors of the cost of wheat in Argentina, he can know a great deal about them. He can, if he will, obtain fairly accurate conceptions of the possibilities of wheat culture, one year with another, in Argentina. The cost of wheat production in any country will be mainly controlled by the physical character of the country and the standard of life of its inhabitants. Of course the amount of capital available is an important factor, but capital is intelligent, and does not go where conditions are not favorable for its use. It leaves such places to the uninformed.

At the head of a farmer's business equipment I would therefore place a good knowledge of physical geography, including commercial routes, which were formerly determined and will always be greatly influenced by physical geography. This is not yet fully recognized by the universities, whose