she may look forward to as an assured hope.

It is to come about through the fulfilment of a plan which was the
outgrowth of the Commission on Country Life, and which has been worked
for by many students of rural conditions and lovers of the countryside.
The whole scheme sets before the Country Girl of to-day an open door and
gives to her more hope of relief from the unfortunate results of the
unscientific farming and unbalanced conditions in the country homes of
the past than any other one thing that has been devised.

But what is this Open Door? To explain this, we must start in by a sort
of detour, with the Boll Weevil. His Imperial Highness was a fiend
incarnate; yet his coming was not all a misfortune. For to rid the land
of this depredating buccaneer among the Southern domains, demonstration
farms were established, and these led to a more adapted form of
conveying help to the distressed and threatened farmers in the cotton
belt by means of instruction carried to the individual farms themselves.
A wonderful degree of success attended this work, and the Western
farmers, seeing this, called to the Government for aid of the same sort
against their own special difficulties, an assistance which was
generously given. Funds were distributed through the States by the
Federal Government, and by means of demonstrations, the Government
sought to give to all the States the benefits that had been proved so
helpful in the South. Meanwhile the States themselves were carrying on
many projects of their own for the advancement of the farming interests
within their bounds. There was likelihood that there might be
duplication of effort, that there might even be waste of means and of
energies. To make sure, then, that this should not happen, the
Government has now devised a new measure, a bill for the inauguration of
Cooperative Agricultural Extension Work, known at present as the
Smith-Lever Bill.

The passing of this bill was an item of the 1914 national budget. Before
the eventful thing happened many processions of women protesting their
desire for more formal acknowledgment before the law and in the
privileges of the vote had walked the length of Fifth Avenue, and in
these processions many men of the highest stamp had taken their
chivalrous place. By the time the bill was being framed the woman side
of things for city and for country had begun to hold a far different
position in the public mind than it did in the days of Thoreau