arm improvement I have ever met.
The General Education Board, who administer large sums provided by Mr.
Rockefeller, recognising the educational value of Dr. Knapp's
operations, are contributing about one hundred thousand dollars a year
to his work. Dr. Knapp and his field agents have no difficulty at all in
demonstrating that the yield may be doubled, and the cost of production
greatly reduced, merely by the application of the most elementary
science to agriculture. I heard him tell of a farmer whom he had induced
to allow his boy--still attending school--to cultivate one acre under
his instructions. In the result the boy quadrupled the number of bushels
of corn to the acre that his father, following the traditional methods,
was able to raise. It would be easy to multiply such instances of
thriftlessness and neglected opportunity, of poverty within easy reach
of abundance, which have brought it about that the future of the nation
is actually endangered by the failure of the food supply to keep pace
with the increase of its still relatively sparse population.

The Southern section furnishes two illustrations of long-standing
neglect, both well worthy of consideration for their pregnant
suggestiveness. The Federal Department of Agriculture recently scored a
notable success in dealing with an insect pest which was threatening the
cotton-growing industry with economic ruin. The boll-weevil, like the
legal and medical professions, thrives upon the follies of humanity. It
attacks the cotton plants which have been weakened by bad husbandry. The
scientists did not succeed in finding in the commonwealth of bugs the
natural enemy of the pest they were after, but Dr. Knapp, with the
wisdom which prefers prevention to cure, seized the opportunity of
teaching cotton-growers to diversify their cultivation. The consequence
was that the cotton crop itself is gradually responding to the
treatment. Many other crops are adding their quota to the produce of the
Southern farms, and an all-round improvement, moral as well as material,
is accompanying the educational discipline through which this reformer
is putting the communities with whom and for whom he is working.

There is another pest in the South which does not attack the farm crops,
but goes straight for the farmer. If the Country Life Commission had
done nothing more, they would have justified their appointment by the
attention they called to the ravages of the hookworm, which have