the signs of progress.
Well-minded philanthropists may feel that the rural districts are in
special need of their services. Even to the watchers on the walls there
is much of discouragement in the advancement that _isn't_ being made.
Yet it needs no prophet's eye to see that a vast change for the better
in rural life and conditions is now in progress.

No student of these conditions expects or desires that the evolution
shall be Acadian in its results. It is to be hoped indeed that country
sweets shall not lose their delights; that the farmer himself may find
in his surroundings spiritual and mental ambrosia. But what is wanted,
and what is rapidly coming, is the breaking down of those barriers which
have so long differentiated country from urban life; the extinction of
that social ostracism which has been the farmer's fate; the obliteration
of that line which for many a youth has marked the bounds of
opportunity: in fact, the creation of a rural society whose advantages,
rewards, prerogatives, chances for service, means of culture, and
pleasures are representative of the best and sanest life that the
accumulated wisdom of the ages can prescribe for mankind.

CHAPTER IV

THE NEW FARMER

All farmers may be divided into three classes. There is the "old"
farmer, there is the "new" farmer, and there is the "mossback." The old
farmer represents the ancient regime. The new farmer is the modern
business agriculturist. The mossback is a mediaeval survival. The old
farmer was in his day a new farmer; he was "up with the times," as the
times then were. The new farmer is merely the worthy son of a noble
sire; he is the modern embodiment of the old farmer's progressiveness.
The mossback is the man who tries to use the old methods under the new
conditions; he is not "up" with the present times, but "back" with the
old times. Though he lives and moves in the present, he really has his
being in the past.

The old farmer is the man who conquered the American continent. His axe
struck the crown from the monarchs of the wood, and the fertile farms of
Ohio are the kingdom he created. He broke the sod of the rich prairies,
and the tasseling cornfields of Iowa tell the story of his deeds. He
hitched his plow to the sun, and his westward lengthening furrows fill
the world's granary.

The new farmer has his largest conquests yet to make. But he has put his
faith in the strong arm of science; he has at his hand the commercial