Patriot user agreement located at: TR American Patriot.com 
THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD

CHAPTER  9

the farmer; the corner-stone of civilization

"DECENTLY an Indiana woman was peeling some potatoes, and in a hollow in one she found a note from the Southern farmer who had raised the potatoes running:

"I got 69 cents. a bushel for these potatoes. How much did you pay for them?"
She wrote back:
"I paid $4 per bushel."
The farmer sent her just one more letter. It said:

"I got 6gc. for those potatoes. It could not have cost more than 3ic. to carry them to you. Who got the other $3? I am going to try to find out."

It is idle to say that when such an occurrence is typical—and it most certainly is to a large extent typical—there is no cause for uneasiness. Something is wrong It may be wholly the fault of outsiders. It may be at least partially the fault of the farmers and of those who eat the food the farmers raise. The trouble may be so deep-rooted in our social system that extreme caution must be exercised in striving for betterment. But one thing is certain. The situation is not satisfactory and calls for a thoroughgoing investigation, with the determination to make whatever changes, including radical changes, are necessary in order once more to put on a healthy basis the oldest and most essential of all occupations, the occupation which is the foundation of all others, the occupation of the tiller of the soil, of the man who by his own labor raises the raw material of food and clothing, without which the whole fabric of the most gorgeous civilization will topple in a week.

We cannot permanently shape our course right on any international issue unless we are sound on the domestic issues; and this farm movement is the fundamental social issue—the one issue which is even more basic than the relations of capitalist and workingman. The farm industry cannot stop; the world is never more than a year from starvation; this great war has immensely increased the cost of living without commensurately improving the condition of the men who produce the things on which we live. Even in this country the situation has become grave.

The temporary causes of this situation have produced such effect in our land only because they aggravated conditions due to fundamental causes which have long been at work. These fundamental causes may all be included in one: the farmers' business in our country has remained almost unchanged during the century which has seen every other business change in profound and radical fashion. He still works by methods belonging to the day of the stage-coach and the horse canal-boat, while every other brain or hand worker in the country has been obliged to shape his methods into more or less conformity to those required by an age of steam and electricity.

Our commercial, banking, manufacturing, and transportation systems have been built up with a rapidity never before approached. We have accumulated wealth at an unheard of rate. There has been grave injustice in the distribution of the wealth, our law-givers having erred both by unwisdom in leaving the matter alone, and at times by even greater unwisdom when they interfered with it. But on the whole the growth and prosperity have been enormous; and yet we have allowed the basic industry of farming, the industry which underlies all economic life, to drift along haphazard, we have allowed the life of the dwellers in the open country to become more and more meager, and their methods of production and of marketing to remain so primitive that their soil was impoverished and their profits largely usurped by others.

In 1880, one farmer in four was a tenant; and at that time the tenant was still generally a young man to whom the position of tenant was merely an intermediate step between that of farm laborer and that of a farm owner. In 1910, over one farmer in three had become a tenant; and nowadays it becomes steadily more difficult to pass from the tenant to the owner stage. If the process continues unchecked, half a century hence we shall have deliberately permitted ourselves to plunge into the situation which brought chaos in Ireland, and which in England resulted in the complete elimination of the old yeomanry, so that nearly nine-tenths of English farmers to-day are tenants and the consequent class division is most ominous for the future. France and Germany are to-day distinctly better off than we are in this respect; and in New Zealand, where there is an excellent system of land distribution, only one-seventh of the farmers are tenants.

If the tendencies that have produced such a condition continue to work unchecked no prophetic power is needed to foretell disaster to the nation. Therefore, the one hopeless attitude, in this as in recent international matters, is "watch ful waiting," sitting still and doing nothing to prepare for or to avert disaster. It is far better to try experiments, even when we are not certain how these experiments will turn out, or when we are certain that the proposed plan contains elements of folly as well as elements of wisdom. Better "trial and error" than no trial at all. And the service test, the test of actual experiment, is the only conclusive test. It is only the attempt in actual practice to realize a realizable ideal that contains hope. Mere writing and oratory and enunciation of theory, with no attempt to secure the service test, amount to nothing.

This applies to the tenancy problem. It also applies to every other farming problem. As regards each, let us test the plans for reform, so far as may be, by actual practice.

For many of these plans the several states offer themselves as natural laboratories, where experiments can be tried when conditions and public opinion are right; and this although the permanent remedies must ultimately, at least in major part, be national. It is exceedingly interesting to watch such an experiment as that seemingly to be tried in North Dakota. This is a farming state, where the farming is the predominant interest, and inasmuch as all reforms cost money, and as even advisable reforms become utterly disastrous if in spending money upon them we treat "the sky as the limit," and decline to consider the proportion between what the reform achieves and what it costs, it is well that the farmers themselves should pay a good proportion of the cost of reforms necessary to and peculiarly affecting themselves. In North Dakota, in addition to matters like hail insurance, it is proposed that the state shall purchase and operate grain elevators, mills and terminals and other business instrumentalities of vital concern to farmers. I most heartily commend the earnest effort the leaders in the movement have made actually to better conditions; and I say this although from the facts at my command I judge that most of the work which it is thus proposed to have done by the state could be done better by cooperative societies among the farmers themselves. Present conditions should certainly be changed. To keep them unchanged is to act in a spirit of mere Toryism. From the North Dakota experiment, when put in actual practice, we can learn some things to follow and some things to avoid; and perhaps we can also learn to be wise in time, and, by sane determination to put in practice reforms that we are reasonably sure will have no bad effects, avoid the sad necessity of paying with our own skins for experiments which probably will have bad effects.

I greatly prefer to see the Government leave untouched whatever the corporations under Government supervision can do; and just as far as possible I want to see all the corporations made into cooperative associations. But there are things so important that the Government must do them, if it is only through such exercise of collective power that they can be done.

Our object must be (i) to make the tenant farmer a landowner; (2) to eliminate as far as possible the conditions which produce the shifting, seasonal, tramp type of labor, and to give the farm laborer a permanent status, a career as a farmer, for which his school education shall fit him, and which shall open to him the chance of in the end earning the ownership in fee of his own farm; (3) to secure cooperation among the small landowners, so that their energies shall produce the best possible results; (4) by progressive taxation or in other fashion to break up and prevent the formation of great landed estates, especially in so far as they consist of unused agricultural land; (5) to make capital available for the farmers, and thereby put them more on an equality with other men engaged in business; (6) to care for the woman on the farm as much as for the man, and to eliminate the conditions which now so often tena to make her life one of gray and sterile drudgery; (7) to do this primarily through the farmer himself, but also, when necessary, by the use of the entire collective power of the people of the country; for the welfare of the farmer is the concern of all of us.

The most important thing to do is to make the tenant farmer a farm owner. He must be financed so that he can acquire title to the land. In New Zealand the government buys land and sells it to small holders at the price paid with a, low rate of interest. Perhaps our Government could try this plan, or else could outright advance the money, charging three and a half per cent, interest. Default in payments—which should of course be on easy terms—would mean that the land reverted to the Government. The experience of the firms which have loaned to the largest number of people to acquire homes on small instalment payments has been that foreclosure occurs in a very small percentage of cases; but it would have to be absolutely understood that no failure to pay would be tolerated; for such toleration would in the end discredit the whole system, and work ruin to the honest and hard-working men who would pay. We could follow the precedents established in connection with the reclamation act in the arid and semi-arid regions of the West. It would be desirable, and entirely feasible, to try the experiment first on a small scale, in experimental fashion; and then to apply it on a larger and larger scale with the modifications shown to be necessary in actual practice.

To break up the big estates it might be best, to try the graduated land tax, or else to equalize taxes as between used and unused agricultural land, which would prevent farm land being helc? for speculative purposes. There can without question be criticism of either proposal. If any better proposal can 'be made and tried we can cheerfully support it and be guided in our theories by the way it turns out. But we ought to insist on something being done—not merely talked about. Every one is agreed that we ought to get more people "back to the land"; but talk on the subject is utterly useless unless we put it in concrete shape and secure a 'service test" even although it costs some money to furnish the means for doing what we say must be done.

As regards furnishing capital to the farmer, the first need is that we shall understand that this is essential, and is recognized to be essential in most civilized lands outside of Russia and the United States, but especially in Denmark, France and Germany. Our farmers must have working capital. The present laws for providing farm loans do not meet the most important case of all, that of the tenant farmer, and do not adequately provide for the landowning farmer. An immense amount of new capital—an amount to be reckoned in billions of dollars—is needed for the proper development of the farms of the United States, in order that our farmers may pass from the position of under-production per acre, may improve and fertilize their lands, and so stock them as both to secure satisfactory returns upon the money invested and also enormously to increase the amount of food produced, while permanently enhancing the value of the land. Lack of capital on the part of the farmer inevitably means soil exhaustion and therefore diminished production. The farmer who is to prosper must have capital; only the prosperous can really meet the needs of the consumer; and in this, as in every other kind of honest business, the only proper basis of success is benefit to both buyer and seller, producer and consumer.

To achieve certain of these objects it may be necessary to make use of the Government; but wherever possible it is better to use private, usually corporate or cooperative, effort. I believe that the day is coming when many kinds of successful business will admit, and insist on, an alloy of philanthropy. It often adds to, instead of diminishing, business success, to become within reasonable limits one's brother's keeper. (Is it necessary to say that in this as in everything else there is need of common sense?)

The Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society has actually tried the experiment of a land bank to help men become farmers. In seventeen years, at an outlay of two million dollars, it has established thirty-five hundred families on farms; and the losses have been small. The manager of this society is now head of the Federal Land Bank in Springfield, Massachusetts. He has proposed an agrarian land bank to do for the United States as a whole what it has already taken part in successfully doing for some thousands of people. Such a land bank would aid tenants to become landowners, agricultural laborers to become small farmers, and landless immigrants with a farming past to go out on the land—where we need them.

California, under the wise administration of Hiram Johnson, pointed the path for advance in this as in so many other directions. She has begun the development of five thousand acres, not by merely throwing the land open for settlement, but by building roads, school-houses, and even certain "improvements" on farms of suitable size; the effort has been to help the man who wishes to farm to go into the country and there find liveable conditions.

Whenever farmers themselves have the intelligence and energy to work through cooperative societies this is far better than having the state undertake the work. Community self-help is normally preferable to using the machinery of Government for tasks to which it is unaccustomed. This applies to the ownership of granaries, slaughter-houses, and the like. There are in Europe cooperative farmers' associations which own and run at a profit many such institutions; and when this is shown to be the case, the other owners of such agencies face the accomplished fact; and it often becomes possible for the farmers then to deal with them on a satisfactory basis.

In Europe these great farmer cooperative associations sometimes control the whole machinery by which their products are marketed. Each little district has its own cooperative group. The groups of all the districts in the state are united again in a large cooperative unit. In this way they do collectively what is beyond the power of any one farmer individually to accomplish. By sending their shipments to market they move them in great bulk-quantities at the lowest possible cost. They contract for long periods ahead and sell in the most advantageous market.

Middlemen are eliminated. The labor of moving farm products is reduced to a minimum. But these enterprises are not state enterprises. The relationship of the state to them is confined to supervision, just as our bank examiners supervise the association of stockholders who come together to do a banking business; and certain general regulations that are in the interest of public policy are imposed upon them. A standard of equity and fair dealing is maintained by the forcing of the publication of accounts and by supplying disinterested examiners who see to it that equity is preserved by honesty and fairness among those associated in the enterprise.

Of course the personal equation is all important; the best of schemes will work badly if we force it against the fundamental issues of fairness and honesty.

A single farmer to-day is no match for the corporations, railroads and business enterprises with which he must deal. Organized into cooperative associations, however, the farmers' power would be enormously increased. The principle upon which such cooperative groups are formed is very simple. The profits are divided partly in the shape of a rebate that is paid in proportion to the volume of business done for each member. The control, however, of the association does not depend upon the number of shares that a member may own but rests upon the democratic basis of one man, one vote. In such associations they elect their own officers who are specifically qualified to deal with the agricultural problems of the association. These officers are subject to the direct control of those whose business and interests they handle. In this way politics is kept out of the farmer's business. Through cooperative organization our farmers can build up their strength.

And normally they can do better in this way than by recourse to an extreme form of state Socialism. The farmers of Denmark, Holland (and parts of France, North Italy and Germany) have pointed the way. In Denmark on a country road in the afternoon one can see a man wearing the cap of the cooperative association push a light wagon through the village, gathering from each house a dozen or two dozen eggs and a roll of butter and cheese. As he takes it he stamps the eggs and records the quantity delivered in the record book of the member. At the end of his three- or four-mile trip he meets a half-dozen other men at a small transfer station owned by the cooperative association. There wagons or trucks load the products brought in and haul them to a nearby railroad station where the trucks from five or six transfer stations gather and fill a railroad car. The railroad car starts and in its journey to the seaport meets several dozen additional cars loaded with the products of the association. At the seaport a ship load is waiting and the entire train load of products is loaded and started for England. In England this ship is unloaded in the warehouse of an English cooperative association. The products—butter, eggs, cheese, milk and other standard farm outputs—have been contracted for on a sliding scale on a yearly basis in advance. Between the peasant farmer of Denmark and the workingman consumer in London there is no middleman. Handling charges are reduced to the minimum. The gain goes to the producer in the shape of almost the full price and to the consumer in the shape of reduced cost. The cooperative farmers association of Denmark buys saltpetre and nitrates in Chili by the ship load, and distributes them as they are unloaded in carload lots to the cooperative associations in every village at a handling charge that is almost insignificantly small. This is the right way for farmers to organize.

Examples of what is done in foreign lands are of great use; yet we must always adapt them to our own needs, and not merely copy them; for no scheme of national betterment can succeed unless it takes into account national characteristics. Experiments in our own country therefore have a peculiar guidance value for us. For this reason those interested in the problem of farm life can well afford to pay some attention to what is at this moment being done in the Sandhill district of central North Carolina.

This is a district of sandy, and rather easily exhausted, soil. It was settled in the middle of the eighteenth century, chiefly by Highland Scotch. It was then covered with valuable pine forest, and there was good, natural pasture. The people worked at lumbering and raised cattle. Gradually the timber was cut off, and the wild pasture grazed out—in our usual wasteful fashion. A rather poor type of tillage was left —cotton and tobacco being the best crops. The people were of fine stock; but the schools were poor, the land was poor, the methods of farming were poor, the roads were bad, life was hard and flattened and joyless, and there was no idea of cooperation among the farmers—or indeed among the townsmen.

Then, a score of years ago, there began to be an uneasy consciousness that things were going backward rather than forward, and that some joint effort must be made or there would be complete dry rot. The effort was begun, with the usual preliminary struggles and failures. Enthusiastic reformers attempted to better matters by wrong-headed action; and "hard-headed, practical men" sourly refused to take part in any action at all. But gradually leaders were developed. Gradually wisdom grew out of the soil of disheartening experience.

The first concerted effort at joint action, made under the lead of half a dozen public-spirited citizens, was an attempted organization confined to the farmers—the cotton, fruit and tobacco growers. The objects were to solve the marketing problem, to devise a system of rural credit for the small farmer, and to spread better knowledge of agricultural methods. This effort failed, one prime cause of the failure being the fact that the townspeople of the section, the merchants and business men who were in reality just as vitally interested in the agricultural prosperity of the section as the farmers themselves, were not asked to join. They had more ready money than the farmers, they were more accustomed to act together and were better acquainted with the outside world, and it was found that their help was essential.

So the organization was transformed into a Board of Trade, which was pledged to promote the development of the section as a whole and the interests of all classes of its citizens. It is composed of farmers, merchants, doctors—all the leading citizens. By its activities it has shown that it represents the organized Sandhill community, covering an area as large as Rhode Island and having a population of some ten thousand souls.

The Board of Trade works in practical fashion; which means that while it tries to educate the people to their real needs, it also commands their confidence by meeting the—usually less important—needs to which they are fully awake. Therefore it advertises fully—but honestly—the advantages of the Sandhills region for settlers and has been instrumental in getting a number to come in. If it did only this it would be no more important than a thousand other local advertising committees. If it did not do this, it would soon cease to appeal to the ordinary man, and would sink into the well-meaning impotence of so many "high brow" associations for a species of uplift which the average man does not regard as practical. This board is a practical organization with intelligently high purposes. No organization can last long enough even to make a beginning in doing practical good to the people unless it is practical; and unless it actually functions instead of confining itself to manifestos and advice. Great is the persuasive power of concrete action!

   The people of the district are working out the two problems of schools and health work. These two problems are, of course, themselves merely portions of the great problem of securing in our struggling, individualistic country democracy the proper regulation by coherent community cooperation and self-control. In other words, our affair is to get our democracy to discipline itself; a difficult task, but essential to perform if we are to become a really great nation.

The Derby Memorial School in the Sandhills represents the consolidation of three small, struggling backwoods schools. There are now over 150 pupils in the school; those that live more than two and one-half miles away are transported in cheap motors at a cost of eight cents per child per day. The school is an excellent school—not markedly different from other first-class country schools in different country regions. There is a school paper, edited by the pupils; the girls set the type and the boys do the printing. There is a library of 1,200 volumes, used as much by the older people of the community as by the children —and it speaks well for the taste of the community that "Treasure Island" is on the whole the most popular book. Not much has been done in the way of vocational training, for the community is conservative and is wedded to old-fashioned book learning; but the school is being used more and more as a community center, and shows what important assets schools can become in neighborhood betterment.

The Sandhill Farm Life School is an agricultural school, started by the Board of Trade, under the state law. The principles of this school are: (i) That the children shall be trained primarily for life in the country, not by books simply, but by actually doing the various things at school that they will be called upon to do in later life. (2) That the school shall turn out good citizens, taught to cooperate, and with a sense of obligation to their community and their nation. Both these ends are being measurably achieved.

There are eighty scholars in the school. All the work is done by the boys and girls themselves. The boys are under military discipline. They dress in khaki, they belong to a rifle club, they drill. Their instructor was at a Platts-burg camp. Some of the boys were at the Plum Island camp last year. The boys do all the work of the farm, which deals chiefly with animal industry; and they fire the furnaces, cut wood, build the roads, etc. There is some theoretical agriculture and laboratory work; but the emphasis is placed on actually doing the job. The school is not an institution of "higher learning." It is not intended to turn out boys who will seek clerkships or become school teachers. The effort is to turn out farmers who will farm.

As regards the girls, the effort is to turn out first-class farmers' wives. They are all dressed in uniforms which they made themselves. They are given a setting-up drill which has proved most beneficial. They do all the housework and cooking, learning by actual practice to do it efficiently and economically. In the kitchen they use the implements of the kind they will have in their own houses—not those used in large hotels. They work hard, but not to the point of drudgery and exhaustion; and in the evenings there is singing, dancing, games or lectures. Surely this is a school along the right lines!

One of the things with which the Board of Trade has grappled is the health problem. As in so many country communities the health of the children is below par. Half of them have hookworm; and there are other common complaints. Some day or other we shall follow Germany's lead in having the Government take care of the health of the ordinary citizen—and of his welfare in other respects also—in return for requiring from him training and service to the state in time of war. At present our physical efficiency is low compared with that of Germany; and private organizations have to partially make good the failure of governmental action.

Three years ago the board instituted fairs, the first ever held in the region. A local paper, the Pinehurst Outlook, describes one of the fairs: There were bands; and parties of girl dancers—an unusual and very pretty feature; and the boy scouts and the boys who had been at the Plum Island camp paraded in company with the Confederate Veterans, all escorting the national flag. Everything was by home talent; there wasn't an imported show in the whole fair. Then there were the usual county fair exhibits; and the girls' canning clubs, and the boys' pig and corn clubs—all managed by the girls and boys who had actually done the work. And there was an exhibition by booths of what the community expected to become; a credit union booth, a cooperative sire owners' association booth, a county hospital booth, a consolidated school booth, etc., etc.

The Board of Trade does not merely write manifestos. It reduces its preaching to practice. In the fall of 1914 cotton went to six cents a pound, and the situation in the South became critical. Every form of wild relief scheme was suggested. But the Sandhill Board of Trade acted with equal energy and common sense. It borrowed $100,000 in Boston, built warehouses at various points in the section and loaned the money on cotton warehouse receipts at eight cents per pound and six per cent, interest. Collateral was provided by patriotic members of the community. It was a striking case of united community action for mutual self-protection; something peculiarly needed in the South, and a long step toward the cooperative spirit and away from the "every man for himself and the community be damned" spirit.

The board employs a secretary, who is also a farm demonstrator-agent for the whole section—a farmer's boy, the son of a poor Kansas farmer, who has worked his way through college, and knows his subject from the ground up no less than from above down. In a recent paper this gentleman put what he was striving to do so well, and what he says is so applicable to so many country communities that I cannot forbear quoting it:

"Whenever the late Marcus Tully Cicero emptied the Roman Senate in order to fill a modern text-book, he usually devoted a considerable part of his speech to matters which he said, 'I shall pass over in silence.' You have asked me to talk about the use of the local paper in community development. I think I have something to say about the use of the local paper; but just what to do in order to develop a community is a subject that 'I shall pass over in silence.' We Sandhillers are making progress, and much that we are doing is, we trust, worthy of being put into operation elsewhere. If any of you care to know just what we think most worth doing for the development of our section, I will be glad to give you a copy of a circular letter written to the members of the Sandhill Board of Trade. From it you will learn that we divide our work into two parts. The first is the stimulating of immigration by means of advertising. To get our section before the eyes of prospective buyers we have used booklets, magazines, lectures, lantern slides, and exhibits. The second and more important part of our work is to prevent emigration by making our community a place which people cannot afford to leave. The first step toward the accomplishment of this is to work out more profitable methods of crop production, less expensive ways of marketing, and all else that makes for prosperity, for as wise old Dr. Knapp persistently pointed out, without prosperity all else must fail. But this is not enough. The philosophy of the belly will never get a community very far. Statistics prove this, for we find that where farm and village people are making money the fastest there they are going to the cities the fastest, because in the cities they find schools, household comforts, entertainment, society, and other things for which they wish to spend their money while they are well; and when they are sick in the cities they can find something more than antediluvian hospital facilities at something less than multi-millionaire prices. That is why we are working so hard to improve our rural schools, build up a successful farm life school, establish our hospital, get public health work going, and to do all else that is mentioned in this circular letter, and which I, like Cicero, now that I have stated the matter pretty fully, 'shall not mention but shall pass over in silence.''

The secretary, assisted by the county agent, gives many lectures with a stereopticon at the schools, thereby meeting inadvertently one of the greatest needs of Southern country life— the need for social life and amusement. They organize those practical children's agricultural clubs—girls' poultry clubs, boys' pig and corn clubs, and the like—which are such forces in the development of the South, where livestock is a necessity to a perfectly balanced farming system, while few farmers can make a success of handling livestock unless they have begun as boys. Soil improvement is, of course, one prime object—and the secretary is really applying his ideas, which, I an? sorry to say, is too often not the case with theoretically excellent farm demonstration work. In farming the theoretical man can often help the practical man—but if he is merely a theorist, even although a very well trained theorist, he is much more apt to be wrong than the practical man he starts in to educate. Yet there must be men of vision to lead. In the South the exclusively "practical" man has gone in for "all cotton" farming; and "all cotton" means a submerged civilization.

The secretary has also organized two credit unions which are working successfully, one at the Derby school and one at the Sandhill Farm Life School. Under the North Carolina Credit Union law the farmers can organize associations very similar to the Raffeissen Credit Unions of Germany. The treasurer of the one at the Derby school writes me as follows: "We have loaned out to the farmers this summer about $400 of their own money. The whole community is tied together on each other's notes. Each man who owns stock or has deposits in the union takes a pretty vital interest in the kind of farming that the men who have borrowed money are doing. It is simply applying the Christian principle to actual life, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' You certainly are if you are a member of a credit union and have gone on his note for money to buy a hog with. It is your business to see that he buys a good hog and feeds it properly and doesn't waste the money on an organ or a graphophone, for if he doesn't succeed, then the community and you don't succeed.

"This fall all the loans of my credit union are being paid promptly and in full. I find that the farmers consider their obligations to the credit union of the first importance. For next year we 'are buying fertilizer cooperatively on money borrowed by the credit union. The farmers are only paying six per cent, for their loans. In buying from the fertilizer companies they were paying from ten per cent, to forty per cent. I never thought the credit unions would work in this individualistic society but I am now convinced that if people of education and with the desire to lead will take off their coats and get down and fight the battles of the people out with them, almost anything- can be made to succeed."

The section stands well in roads, thanks to a leading citizen who combined vision and common sense. He built the first sand-clay road, of a type which is both cheap and serviceable. The first section was built for a quarter of a mile parallel to an old sand road. Then he gave a barbecue to the neighbors; loaded a wagon with more cotton than anybody present had ever seen pulled by a team before, and sent it up the sand-clay road. The horses pulled it easily; but as soon as it ended and they reached the sand road they came to a dead halt. This practical demonstration won the day, and the section is now covered by real roads, built by the people themselves.

What is being done in the Sandhill district along this line is being done on genuinely patriotic grounds. Those who have taken the lead frankly say that they are interested less from the mondial-humanitarian than from the national-American standpoint. As one of them has expressed it, "I want to play on a strong team and I want my team—the United States— to win when it comes to a showdown."

The Board of Trade has arranged with the State Board of Health for a complete medical examination of all the school children. It has built at the Farm Life School a hospital with two six-bed wards, an operating room, and equipment. It has employed a competent resident nurse—and she is assisted by the school girls, who thus learn the rudiments of nursing. It has aided the doctors of the Sandhills to organize a hospital staff; and a marked impetus has been given the medical and surgical work of the district. The hospital is not a charitable institution; it is run on the theory that it is to be self-supporting, and that every patient must pay something.

One of the most active organizers and promoters of this Sandhill work has recently summed it up as follows:

"Our organization, such as it is, has many defects and we have had many failures and many disappointments. We have not accomplished half of what we set out to accomplish. But we have done two things. We have inspired in the people of this section a spirit of real cooperation that is rare everywhere in our country, and perhaps especially rare in the South. We have succeeded in making them see the advantage of pulling together and occasionally sacrificing themselves and their interests for the welfare of the community. That only a few men have done most of the leading is only natural. Only a few will lead under any circumstances. It is the number that will follow that counts. We have also imposed on the community certain institutions that eventually will be of great benefit to it and which the people will eventually support in full. In my estimation we have gone quite far in making a democratic community discipline itself. We endeavor to make our people more prosperous, with fuller, happier lives; but above all we endeavor to make them less  selfish  and  readier to sacrifice themselves for an ideal."

This is the spirit, both practical and lofty, deferential both to common sense and to idealism, considerate of both one's own needs and of those of one's fellows, in which we should approach the problems of our farming population—and all our other problems also.