of
the individual farmer depends largely upon his business sense and his
technical education, it is folly to hope that the success of agriculture
as an industry and the influence of farmers as a class can be based
solely upon the ability of each farmer to raise a big crop and to sell
it to advantage. General intelligence, appreciation of the trend of
economic and social forces, capacity to co-operate, ability to voice his
needs and his rights, are just as vital acquirements for the farmer as
knowing how to make two blades of grass grow where but one grew before.
It finally comes to this, that the American farmer is obliged to study
the questions that confront him as a member of the industrial order and
as a factor in the social and political life of the nation, with as much
zeal and understanding as he is expected to show in the study of those
natural laws governing the soil and the crops and the animals that he
owns.

In this connection it is significant to note that farmers themselves are
already quite as interested in the social problems of their particular
calling and in the general economic and political questions of the day,
as they are in science applied to their business of tilling the soil.
Not necessarily that they minimize the latter, but they seem
instinctively to recognize that social forces may work them ill or work
them good according to the direction and power of those forces. This
statement is illustrated by the fact that the aims, purposes, labors,
and discussions of the great farmers' organizations like the Grange are
social in character, having to do with questions that are political,
economic, sociological.

When, however, we turn to those public educational agencies that are
intended to assist in the solution of the farm problem, we discover that
they are giving slight attention to the social side of the question. An
examination of the catalogues of the agricultural colleges, whether
separate institutions or colleges of state universities, reveals the
fact that, beyond elementary work in economics, in civics, and
occasionally in sociology, little opportunity is given students to study
the farm question from its social standpoint. With a few exceptions,
these institutions offer no courses whatever in rural social problems,
and even in these exceptional cases the work offered is hardly
commensurate with the importance of the subject. Nearly all our other
colleges and universities are subject to th