All this is changing fast. The Federal Department of Agriculture is now perhaps the most popular and respected of the world's great administrative institutions. In the Middle West, a newly awakened public opinion has set up an honourable rivalry between such States as Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Minnesota, in developing the agricultural sides of their Universities and Colleges. None the less, Mr. James J. Hill has recently given it as his opinion that not more than one per cent of the farmers of these regions are working in direct touch with any educational institution. It is probable that this estimate leaves out of account the indirect influence of the vast amount of extension work and itinerant instruction which is embraced in the activities of the Universities and Colleges. I fear it cannot be denied that in the application of the natural sciences to the practical, and of economic science to the business of farming, the country folk are decades behind their urban fellow-citizens. And again I say the disparity is to be attributed to the difference in their respective degrees of organisation for business purposes.
The relation between business organisation and economic progress ought, I submit, to be very seriously considered by the social workers who perceive that progress is mainly a question of education. Speaking from administrative experience at home, and from a good deal of interested observation in America, I am firmly convinced that the new rural education is badly handicapped by the lack of organised bodies of farmers to act as channels for the new knowledge now made available. In some instances, I am aware, great good has been done by the formation of farmers' institutes which have been established in order to interest rural communities in educational work and to make the local arrangements for instruction by lectures, demonstrations and otherwise. But all European experience proves the superiority for this purpose of the business association to the organisation _ad hoc_, and has a much better chance of permanence.
Again, the influence upon rural life of the agricultural teaching of the Colleges and Universities, as exercised by their pupils, may be too easily accepted as being of greater potential utility than any work which these institutions can do amongst adults. This is a mistake. The thousands of young men who are now being trained for advanced farming too often have to restrict the practical application of their theoretic knowledge to the home circle, which is not always responsive, for a man is not usually a prophet in his own family. It is here that the educational value of coöperative societies comes in; they act as agencies through which scientific teaching may become actual practice, not in the uncertain future, but in the living present. A coöperative association has a quality which should commend it to the social reformer--the power of evoking character; it brings to the front a new type of local leader, not the best talker, but the man whose knowledge enables him to make some solid contribution to the welfare of the community.