m for exercise of skill becomes larger and more
varied. The wide difference between pioneer farming and market-gardening
illustrates this. The history of agriculture shows the slow development of
skill in the furrow, the ditch and hedge, and in the handling and breeding
of stock. Farmers once barely scratched an acre a day with their rude plow
and were long in learning the use of a harrow. No attempt, according to
Professor Rogers, to improve the breeds of cattle and sheep appeared
before the eighteenth century in England. Most early improvements in
farming skill came from the industrious monks, whose intelligence fostered
skill.

The advantage given by skill perpetuates skill from generation to
generation through aptitude and superior training, and so the people of a
neighborhood or a country may inherit such power in contrast with other
regions. "Yankee ingenuity" has become proverbial through such natural
extension.

_Discipline._--Education serves the same purpose by acquisition of
knowledge in such ways as to give wisdom in its application. It involves
an exercise of intelligence to the establishing of sound judgment. Broader
than skill in its range, it increases the possibilities of skill as
storage of power. The skill of the surgeon would never have existed but
for the brightening of his intelligence by education. The electrician's
training depends upon a broad foundation of education in knowledge of the
matters he handles so dextrously. In farming, this source of stored up
power has until very recently been ignored. While men in many professions
were multiplying their individual power by spending youth in school, the
farm boy would be simply trained at the plow, without the enlargement of
practice in thinking required elsewhere. Such education has become at
length, like skill, a requisite of each generation in order that our
civilization may be maintained. For this the states build and the nation
sustains agricultural colleges.

_Character._--Just as important, though often overlooked in enumerating
economic forces, is the acquired personal habit of self-control. Without
it both skill and education avail but little, and it may do its work
independently of both. "Tried and trusted" expresses our estimate of the
importance of long practice of virtue in meeting obstacles. The formation
of habits--personal, business and moral,--is a matter of time and
discipline. It costs exertion through a series of years; but th