respective communities.
These leaders discuss the larger community problems in distinction
from individual problems. At this gathering, for instance, the
principal of the County High School at Cottage Grove, Ala., explained
how through diversified farming the parents of his students had been
able to live while holding their cotton for higher prices.

Some of the principals of schools told how they had accepted cotton as
payment of tuition for some of their students. Others had taken in
payment barrels of syrup, sacks of corn, and hogs. All the schools
reported cutting expenses, by reduction of their dietary, the salaries
of teachers, or some other forms of retrenchment, meaning sacrifice
for students or teachers, or both, that the work of education might
continue and weather the hard times. In concluding the conference
Booker Washington explained the terms of the recently enacted Smith
Lever Act for Federal aid in the extension of agricultural education
throughout the rural districts of the country. Thus ended the
twentieth session of the great Tuskegee Negro Conference and the last
session presided over by the Founder of the Conference. It was most
appropriate that this, his last conference, should have so unanimously
and effectively applied one of the leading tenets of Booker
Washington's teaching--namely, the winning of lasting profit from the
experiences of adversity.

As well as these annual Farmers' Conferences there are held at
Tuskegee monthly meetings for the farmers from the locality where they
display their products, tell of their successes and failures, and
compare notes on their experiences all under the expert leadership,
guidance, and advice of the staff of the agricultural department of
the Institute. Every month, or oftener, there is an agricultural
exhibit in which the best products of the various crops such as
potatoes, corn, and cotton are displayed, and the methods used in
their production explained by figures and graphic charts.

As early as 1895 Booker Washington started a campaign to get his
people to raise more pigs. This campaign he revived at intervals, and
for the last time in the fall of 1914, when the whole country and
particularly the South was suffering from the first acute depression
caused by the European War. In the Southern States this depression
was, of course, especially acute because the European market for
cotton was for the time being cut off. As one of the means to aid his
p