some seasons with total crop failure, has been in the past
the bitter lot of the husbandman. Many a farm boy has thus had the courage
crushed out of him in early teens and has ignominiously retreated to the
city. Many a farmer's wife has grown prematurely old and has slaved
herself to death, leaving her children and her home to a younger
successor. These conditions of course still continue even in the new age.
Great numbers of farmers are still hopelessly poor, many of them
needlessly so, through ignorance, slovenly management, laziness or
willful unprogressiveness. But the rural moss-back is being laid upon the
shelf with other fossils and soon will possess only historical interest.
Great organized effort is being made to redeem him by the gospel of
scientific farming before he dies, and the effort is by no means vain.

III. Increased Popular Intelligence.

The new rural civilization, however, is by no means a mere matter of
methods. The farmer himself has been growing more intelligent. County
agricultural societies, first organized in 1810, set the farmers to
thinking. Many farm journals have contributed widely to the farmers'
education. But in the past twenty years many agencies have united in what
has been a great rural uplift. The government's department of agriculture,
the experiment stations established in each state, the better-farming
trains with their highly educative exhibits, the countless farmers'
institutes for fruitful discussions, the extension work of state
universities, the local and traveling libraries, and especially the
agricultural colleges, through their short courses in the winter, their
stimulating and instructive bulletins, their great variety of extension
service through their territory, are among the many agencies for popular
education in country districts which are becoming thoroughly appreciated
and highly effective. In a great variety of ways a genuine rural culture
is being developed, with its own special characteristics and enduring
values. All this is helping to make country life vastly worth while.

[Illustration: This picture illustrates school garden work at the
Macdonald Consolidated School, Guelph, Canada, E. A. Howes, Principal. The
time is June.]

[Illustration: The same garden at harvest time, in September.]

This increased culture among country people is a great factor in the new
rural civilization which must be given due consideration. It is this which
is overcoming