Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/264

260 dream unless, added to the possession of a heart for such work, the clergyman knows the farm problem sufficiently to appreciate the broader phases of the industrial and social life of his people. (5) Editors of farm papers, and of the so-called 'country' papers. Probably the editors of the better class of agricultural papers are less in need of instruction such as that suggested than is almost any one else. Yet the same arguments that now lead many young men aspiring to this class of journalism to regard a course in scientific agriculture as a vestibule to their work, may well be used in urging a study of rural social science, especially at a time when social and economic problems are pressing upon the farmer. As for the country papers, the work of purveying local gossip and stirring the party kettle too often obscures the tremendous possibilities for a high class service to the rural community which such papers may render. No men, in the agricultural states at least, have more real influence in their community than the trained, clean, manly, country editors—and there is a multitude of such men. If as a class they possessed also a wider appreciation of the farmer's industrial difficulties and needs, hardly any one could give better service to the solution of the farm problem than could they. (6) Everybody else! That is to say, the agricultural question is big enough and important enough to be understood by educated people. The farmers are half our people. Farming is the largest single industrial interest in the country. The capital invested in agriculture is four fifths the capital invested in manufacturing and railway transportation combined. Whether an individual has a special interest in business, in economics, in education, or in religious institutions, he ought to know the place of the farm and the farmer in that question. No one can have a full appreciation of the social and industrial life of the American people who is ignorant of the agricultural status.

The natural place to begin work in rural social science is the agricultural college. Future farmers and teachers of farmers are supposed to be there. The subjects embraced are as important in solving the farm problem as are biology, physics or chemistry. No skilled farmer or leader of farmers should be without some reasonably correct notions of the principles that determine the position of agriculture in the industrial world. A brief study of the elements of political economy, of sociology, of civics, is not enough; no more than the study of the elements of botany, of chemistry and of zoology is enough. The specific problems of the farmer that are economic need elucidation alongside the study of soils and crops, of plant- and stock-breeding. And these economic topics should be thoroughly treated by men trained in social science, and not incidentally by men whose chief interest is technical agriculture.

The normal schools may well discuss the propriety of adding one or