educational system in the interest of a larger West. The
notable State universities of the Middle and Far West, the Normal
Schools, the prevalent system of education, have been felt, and are now
being felt, in the progressive, efficient, Western population. Nothing
less than a generally educated public could have made the West in the
brief years that have elapsed since it was a wilderness. Nothing save
general education can make the resources of the South yield up their
greatest advantage to the Southern people.

The time for traditional formalism has passed in the South, as it has
passed in every other progressive community. Whatever the needs of the
community may be, those needs must be met through some form of public
education. In the South the most pressing need appears in the demand for
intelligent farming. For decades the tenant farmers, largely negroes,
cultivated their farms as their fathers had cultivated. They raised
cotton because the raising of cotton offered the path of least
resistance. Farm animals were scarce, because the farm animals only came
with surplus cash, and surplus cash was scarce indeed in districts where
the tenant farmers lived through the year on the credit obtained from
the prospective cotton crops. There was little corn raised, because the
people did not understand the need for raising corn, nor did they
realize the financial possibilities of the Southern corn crop. In a
word, the agricultural South lacked the knowledge which modern
scientific agriculture has brought.

The past generation has seen a revolution in Southern agriculture,
because of the revolution which has occurred in Southern agricultural
education. Led by the experiment stations and universities, the South
has undertaken to reorganize its system of living from the land.

The Atlanta banker fully realized the need for culture. He was himself a
cultured gentleman; but he also saw that before the people of the South
could have culture, they must have an economic system directed with
sufficient intelligence to supply the necessaries of life, which must
always be taken for granted before the possibilities of culture are
realized. Cultural education comes after, and not before, education for
intelligent and direct vocational activity.

During the educational revolution of the past twenty-five years, no
section of the country has thrown itself into the foreground of
educational progress with more vigor and with greater earnes