to make the
preparation necessary to master his subject can expect to succeed. He
must, also, be a man of absolute honesty, and he must lead a clean
life. It was Bismarck who said, of German university students,
"One-third die out; one-third rot out; the other third rule Germany."
Every man who will may choose whether he will belong to Bismarck's
second or third class.

The question for the young man of 20 is not merely as to the morrow,
but what is likely to be the trend of events during the next 35 to 50
years.

"In 1800 the United States nowhere crossed the Mississippi and nowhere
touched the Gulf of Mexico." In 1850 the country west of the
Mississippi River was agriculturally largely an undiscovered region.
Since 1870 we have much more than doubled our population and our
agriculture. Since that time we have subdued more of the open country
to the uses of man than we had been able to do in 250 years of our
previous history.

During the past 300 years we have prided ourselves upon being an
agricultural people. We have been an agricultural people, but our
problems have not been chiefly those of the agriculturist, but those
of the engineer.

Our problem, in the past, has not been to make two blades of grass to
grow where but one grew before. Our problem has been to harvest and
transport two bushels of wheat or two bales of cotton with the labor
previously required to harvest one. Our crops have been so abundant
that the agricultural problems connected with the growing of them has
been secondary to the engineering problems of their harvesting and
transportation. The self-binder and the steam locomotive have been our
achievements.

If the writer mistakes not, the future problem will not be so much the
harvesting and transporting, as the growth of the crops. In the
future, young men will be needed who have studied the science of
living things in order that they may make, literally, two blades of
grass to grow where but one grew. To men who will be able to do so,
will come success and honor.

CHAPTER V

WHERE TO LOCATE

Unless the young farmer expects to return to the ancestral home, the
first question he must settle is where he is going to locate. Indeed,
one of the most common questions asked is, What do you think of this
state or that state or this region or that as a place to farm? There
are few questions harder to answer. This is due, among ot