t-breeding to develop new
varieties of better quality, heavier bearing, or immune to disease;
more efficient and economical ways of maintaining soil fertility;
better methods of marketing; and better technical education of the
individual farmer. Each of these topics, and a number of other minor
ones, would require a chapter in a complete treatise on agricultural
economics. Here this mere enumeration must be allowed to convey its
own suggestion of far-reaching results for the whole political economy
of the nation and of the world.

Indeed, so much has been written in a Barnumesque way of the
wonders of the new agriculture, that its actual results and further
possibilities are in many minds absurdly exaggerated. It has not as
yet been potent enough to prevent diminishing returns in respect to
the great staple foods and raw materials obtained by agriculture.
It apparently has barely kept pace with the needs of the growing
population of Christendom. It has enabled a larger population to exist
in about the same, if not in a worse condition, on the same area,
while progress in cheapness of goods has come almost entirely from the
side of the chemical and the mechanical industries. It does not
give the promise of an indefinite amelioration of the lot of an
indefinitely multiplying population. But to a population slowly
increasing, a new and ever newer agriculture, utilizing constantly the
achievements of the natural sciences and the mechanic arts, ensures
the possibility of a steady betterment of the popular welfare in city
and in open country alike.

Sec. 10. #Difficulty of cooeperation among farmers#. Rural communities
are proverbially conservative; the American farmer is proverbially
an individualist. No wonder, then, that the new ideas and plans of
cooeperation in business matters have made headway in agriculture
slowly and with difficulty. The need of mutual aid among American
farmers is especially great, for, as has often been, said, isolation
is the problem of the farm as congestion is that of the city. On the
frontier a cooeperative spirit manifested itself frequently in mutual
helpfulness, in house raising bees, husking bees, threshing bees, and
other similar gatherings.

But this spirit seems to have almost disappeared in the older
communities, the more rapidly doubtless in the period of decaying
agricultural prosperity.[2] To-day, for example, it is impossible on
a certain Pennsylvania road for one more progressi