Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/263

Rh used simply by young men desiring the shortest cut, and hence an inferior preparation, to a professional career, and the real agricultural interests of the state in question remain almost completely untouched. The 'agricultural' college in which the student can pursue a course largely non-agricultural is a monstrosity, but, unhapppily, not a curiosity.

Louisiana among southern states seems to have succeeded best in agricultural education, though she lacks much of a complete system. She has a number of schools distributed among sections of the state differing in soil, climate, topography and latitude, in which nothing but agricultural sciences and practical farm work are taught, and in which the sons of millionaire sugar planters, along with all others, are compelled to work, not to help pay their expenses, but in order to learn farming.

To urge the uneducated farmer to diversify crops is to make demands beyond his preparation. Tell him that it will render life more interesting, and you are talking into his deaf ear; inform him that it will preserve the fertility of the land, and he will not believe you; point out that though the fruit and vegetable crop is only 2 per cent, of the acreage, it is 8.3 per cent, of the value of all crops of the country; and he will forget it; remind him of the fact that his well-to-do neighbor plants cereals extensively, raises hogs and has a fine flock of sheep, and he will explain that his neighbor can do these things because he is rich, and will stubbornly decline the theory that his neighbor is rich, in part at least, because he does these things. Agricultural education brings agricultural diversification as inevitably as general education produces diversity of professions, and nothing else ever can secure it.

And lastly the southern farmer needs better facilities for obtaining credit.

Figures for the whole south are not at hand, but those for the state of South Carolina indicate that banking capital is less abundant now than before the war of secession, notwithstanding the rapid multiplication of banks all over the south during the last ten years. The capital, surplus and circulation of banks in South Carolina to-day is $11,802,584, of $8.81 per capita; whereas in 1861 these items for the twenty banks then in existence aggregated $21,031,522, equaling $29.88 per capita; while in 1850 the per capita rate for the same items was $32.73. The disreputable character of much ante-bellum banking necessitates my stating that there was not a single bank failure in South Carolina from the Revolution to 1861; her bankers won the commendation of the most exacting critics, and their notes passed