If, when a boy is seventeen or eighteen years of age, he clamors for release from the schoolroom, it may be better to apprentice him to business forthwith. There is no sense in pouring water into a vessel that is already filled. But if he aspires to further learning and is willing, if necessary, to work for it, let him go ahead, as knowledge will make him a better and a stronger man. And anything that adds to a boy's culture and strength of character must benefit and not handicap him in the race of life.

Take the case of two young men, both eighteen years of age. One entering business, the other college, at twenty-two years of age the former, assuming that he is faithful and energetic, will have advanced several grades in promotion while the latter after leaving college, must begin exactly where the other began four years before, quite possibly starting in a position subordinate to and under the direction of the other. But what will be their relative positions four years later? That is the point. We must follow the argument far enough to see that in a long race the contestant with greater quality and staying power will win out. Here's another actual case. A boy entered a carpet factory at $3 at week. He saw that the big men of the factory, the $25,000 a year men, had scientific training not obtainable at the factory. So he threw up his job, went to New Haven, worked his way through a scientific school and is now back at the old factory at $7 per day as a chemist. All this in four years. Had he. remained at the factory he would now have been glad to get $15 a week with no prospect of substantial advancement. Already he is a valuable man with a future before him practically unlimited.

Again, in the race for commercial success, much depends upon the physical stamina and condition of the contestants. The man whose vitality is below par has but little chance to succeed, especially if he does not know how to preserve his health or to recover it when impaired. The college man has had his interest aroused in athletic exercises, as in all of the modern educational institutions instruction is given by competent physicians as to the proper care of the body in health and sickness. Handsomely appointed gymnasiums invite the student to daily exercise, with the almost inevitable result that

he acquires that greatest of all blessings,-a sound mind in a sound body. Therefore, when the hard battles of business life come, the college man's training is very apt to make him a winner, whereas his less fortunate brother may become a nervous wreck or an inmate of an insane asylum.

There is one aspect of the question upon which great emphasis should be placed. No young man can go through college without coming to see in the end that a well-rounded, happy, successful career means more than the mere accumulation of dollars. He will gather them in as long as he can do so honestly. But to him with his broader outlook, life is something more than food and clothes. That "man shall not live by bread alone" is a truism with him. The ideals that are part of him afford a personal satisfaction, deep and lasting. His reputation in the business world grows apace, and merchants and others are glad to do business with him because of his known respectability. And just because he has acquired a higher standard of values, he is more likely to attain to the highest success of all,-a worthy and efficient life.

The Place of Agriculture in Higher Education

L. H. BAILEY, DIRECTOR OF NEW YORK STATE COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE, CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, NEW YORK

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HE subject may be approached from one or both of two diverse points of view,-from the side of the general social welfare, and from the side of the technical content of a course for the higher education in agriculture. I am most interested at present in the former, although the effectiveness of any education by means of agriculture must depend on the soundness of its organization in any institution, the carefulness of its processes, and the enthusiasm of its execution.

THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE

It

We are gradually passing to higher levels and to broader views of life. Educational procedure is keeping step with this onward movement and is constantly readjusting itself to conditions. That is to say, education is becoming a real part of life. Education has not always been a real part of life. It has not related itself to the work-a-day affairs of men and women. has not been a real vestibule to the activity and accomplishment of adulthood. In making these statements, I intend no disparagement of the educational policy and procedure of our former days. I am speaking from the point of view of the evolution of human institutions. Our older educational method made strong and staunch men, but it did not give us the technical knowledge that we needed to conquer a continent or a world and to make the best use of it. School and life have been at variance.

Whatever may have been the theory, it has been the practice that education is the privilege of the special and advantaged classes, of those who have risen out of the general human mass, and who all too often have stood stolidly on the backs of the subject peoples. This has necessarily been so; and yet during

all these many centuries the common people in their own places in all the ways and byways of the world have been calling bitterly for help.

It seems to be a temper of the human mind to desire those things and to endeavor to reach those states that lie far beyond the common life of the common day. We set our affections on things remote. We have desired to be translated, even from the days when the followers of Dionysus projected themselves into other states until the present time; and yet we live in a real world of actualities and of common things. If we are to make this real world mean very much to us we must put ourselves in vibration with it and be prepared to receive the most from it; and if we are to effectualize the lives of others, we must open their minds to the meaning of the common world in which they live. Even if we are thinking chiefly of the world to come, we really cannot prepare ourselves effectively for it without becoming a real and willing part of the very conditions in which we Live.

The world is gradually coming to this point of view. We have practically left the old definition of "culture" as the endall and be-all. We are now educating our people for efficiency and capability. We are escaping our bonds. We are rising beyond the narrowness and poverty of old educational systems.

We shall not lose the old. If the old will no longer constitute the whole, it will still contribute its part in the development of the race, and I think in its redirected forms will be absolutely more important than it has ever been in the past. We are escaping educational manners and attitudes, and, however we define it, we really believe that an educated man is not determined by the particular route through which he has come, but by the perfectness to which he has developed in breadth of view, clear reasoning, good judgment, tolerance, high ideals, sensitiveness to art and nature, devotion to service.

In the past fifty years or more we have been adding to college courses one subject after another. Our educational structure has been growing by the process of accretion. We have added

medicine, engineering, mechanics, and other professions, but at last we have introduced a leaven into the very center of the lump. This ferment is education by means of agriculture.

Most of our special and technical college education aims to develop the professional and occupational side of the man in order that he himself may receive more reward for his effort and reach a higher place amongst his fellows. It is concerned only secondarily and often remotely with the man or woman who actually performs the ultimate labor. In agriculture, however, the case is quite different, because the man on the farm is the one who himself performs the labor or is immediately responsible for it. The whole purpose of agriculture-education, if it is true to its opportunity, is to reach the last man in the terms of his daily life. This is why our leading colleges of agriculture are so vitalized with the social spirit. Here is an educational process that attempts to reach the real fundamental strata and the broad human levels. It cares less about professionalism and occupationalism than it does about the development of all the folk who live on the land, to the end that a new rural civilization may be produced. Education by means of agriculture, therefore, is not merely to add one more thing to our educational institutions: it is to remake much of our education. In this great result it will be seconded in a very effective way by the complementary movement to educate workers in all other industrial fields.

All this may sound like the vagary of a specialist, but I am willing to wait the issue. The movement will develop not only the individual but will relate him to his responsibility to the welfare of the outermost man and woman. It is dominated and directed by the idea of rendering service. It takes hold of the real problems of the people in the places where the people live.

This education by means of agriculture, which has been slowly formulating and finding itself for a century, has now become visible, and in my opinion it is the most important single contemporaneous contribution to the method and outlook of education in general. You will find it redirecting our educational thought in the time just ahead of us.