peration in letting us
have these accounts.

"I want some manual training equipment for wood-working and metal working,
and a blacksmith and wagon shop, in which the boys may learn to shoe
horses, repair tools, design buildings, and practise the best agricultural
engineering. So I want a blacksmith and handyman with tools regularly on
the job--and he'll more than pay his way. I want some land for actual
farming. I want to do work in poultry according to the most modern
breeding discoveries, and I want your cooperation in that, and a poultry
plant somewhere in the district.

"I want a laboratory in which we can work on seeds, pests, soils, feeds
and the like. For the education of your children must come out of these
things.

"I want these things because they are necessary if we are to get the
culture out of life we should get--and nobody gets culture out of any sort
of school--they get it out of life, or they don't get it at all.

"So I want you to build as freely for your school as for your cattle and
horses and hogs.

"The school I ask for will make each of you more money than the taxes it
will require would make if invested in your farm equipment. If you are not
convinced of this, don't bother with me any longer. But the money the
school will make for you--this new kind of rural school--will be as
nothing to the social life which will grow up--a social life which will
make necessary an assembly-room, which will be the social center, because
it will be the educational center, and the business center of the
countryside.

"I want all these things, and more. But I don't expect them all at once. I
know that this district is too small to do all of them, and therefore, I
am going to tell you of another want which will tempt you to think that I
am crazy. I want a bigger district--one that will give us the financial
strength to carry out the program I have sketched. This may be a
presumptuous thing for me to propose; but the whole situation here
to-night is presumptuous on my part, I fear. If you think so, let me go;
but if you don't, please keep this meeting together in a permanent
organization of grown-up members of the Woodruff school, and by pulling
together, you can do these things--all of them--and many more--and you'll
make the Woodruff District a good place to live in and die in--and I shall
be proud to live and die in it at your service, as the neighborhood's
hired man!"

As Jim sat down there was a hush in t