e bookshelf. Better than time to read is time to think. The
farmer has always been a man who pondered things in his heart. He has
had a chance to meditate. No culture is sound except it has been bought
by much thinking; all else is veneer. Farm life gives in good measure
this time to think. But it is in nature that the farmer finds or may
find his most fertile field for culture. Here he is at home. Here he
may revel if he will. Here he may find the sources of mind-liberation
and of soul-emancipation. He may be the envy of everyone who dwells in
the city because he lives so near to nature's heart. Bird and flower,
sky and tree, rock and running brook speak to him a various language. He
may read God's classics, listen to the music of divine harmonies, and
roam the picture galleries of the Eternal. So too in his dealings with
his kind, he lives close to men and women who are frank, virile, direct,
clean, independent. The culture coming from such associations is above
price. One learns to pierce all shams, to honor essential manhood, to
keep pure the fountains of sympathy, ambition, and love. Thus on the
farm one may find full opportunity for that second means of culture,
leisure.

Another powerful agency for cultivating the human soul is service.
Indeed, service is the dynamic of life. To be of use is the ambition
that best stimulates real growth. Culture is the end of life, the spirit
of service the motive power. So it is of this I would speak perhaps most
fully, not only because it is a vital means of culture, but because it
is also peculiarly the privilege and duty of the college man and the
college woman. For let it be said that if any college student secures a
diploma of any degree without having been seized upon by a high ambition
to be of some use in the work of helping humanity forward, then have
that person's years of study been in vain, and his teaching also vain.
The college man comes not to be ministered unto but to minister. He has
been poorly taught if he leaves college with no thought but for his
material success. He must have had a vision of service, his lips touched
with a coal from the altar of social usefulness, and his heart
cultivated to respond to the call for any need he can supply, "Here am
I, send me."

I think it may safely be said that there is no field which offers better
chance for leadership to the average college man or woman than does the
farm. Take, for instance, politics. The majority of