aith in human nature to
believe that that particular farmer would continue to operate his farm
on the new method and that his neighbours, having this practical example
of growing prosperity, would imitate him.

Such was the famous "Demonstration Work" of Dr. Seaman A. Knapp; this
activity is now a regular branch of the Department of Agriculture,
employing thousands of agents and spending not far from $18,000,000 a
year. Its application to the South has made practically a new and rich
country, and it has long since been extended to other regions. When Dr.
Buttrick first met Knapp, however, there were few indications of this
splendid future. He brought Dr. Knapp North and exhibited him to Page.
This was precisely the kind of man who appealed to Page's sympathies.
His mind was always keenly on the scent for the new man--the original
thinker who had some practical plan for uplifting humankind and making
life more worth while. And Dr. Knapp's mission was one that had filled
most of his thoughts for many years; its real purpose was the enrichment
of country life. Page therefore took to Dr. Knapp with a mighty zest. He
supported him on all occasions; he pled his cause with great eloquence
before the General Education Board, whose purse strings were liberally
unloosed in behalf of the Knapp work; in his writings, in speeches, in
letters, in all forms of public advocacy, he insisted that Dr. Knapp had
found the solution of the agricultural problem. The fact is that Page
regarded Knapp as one of the greatest men of the time. His feeling came
out with characteristic intensity on the occasion of the homely
reformer's funeral. "The exercises," Page once told a friend, "were held
in a rather dismal little church on the outskirts of Washington. The day
was bleak and chill, the attendants were few--chiefly officials of the
Department of Agriculture. The clergyman read the service in the most
perfunctory way. Then James Wilson, the Secretary of Agriculture, spoke
formally of Dr. Knapp as a faithful servant of the Department who always
did well what he was told to do, commending his life in an altogether
commonplace fashion. By that time my heart was pretty hot. No one seemed
to divine that in the coffin before them was the body of a really great
man, one who had hit upon a fruitful idea in American agriculture--an
idea that was destined to cover the nation and enrich rural life
immeasurably." Page was so moved by this lack of appreciatio