No; I shall never be Dean of any college of agriculture. And yet I knew
agriculture. It was my profession. I was born to it, reared to it,
trained to it; and I was a master of it. It was my genius. I can pick
the high-percentage butter-fat cow with my eye and let the Babcock Tester
prove the wisdom of my eye. I can look, not at land, but at landscape,
and pronounce the virtues and the shortcomings of the soil. Litmus paper
is not necessary when I determine a soil to be acid or alkali. I repeat,
farm-husbandry, in its highest scientific terms, was my genius, and is my
genius. And yet the state, which includes all the citizens of the state,
believes that it can blot out this wisdom of mine in the final dark by
means of a rope about my neck and the abruptive jerk of gravitation--this
wisdom of mine that was incubated through the millenniums, and that was
well-hatched ere the farmed fields of Troy were ever pastured by the
flocks of nomad shepherds!

Corn? Who else knows corn? There is my demonstration at Wistar, whereby
I increased the annual corn-yield of every county in Iowa by half a
million dollars. This is history. Many a farmer, riding in his motor-
car to-day, knows who made possible that motor-car. Many a sweet-bosomed
girl and bright-browed boy, poring over high-school text-books, little
dreams that I made that higher education possible by my corn
demonstration at Wistar.

And farm management! I know the waste of superfluous motion without
studying a moving picture record of it, whether it be farm or farm-hand,
the layout of buildings or the layout of the farm-hands' labour. There
is my handbook and tables on the subject. Beyond the shadow of any
doubt, at this present moment, a hundred thousand farmers are knotting
their brows over its spread pages ere they tap out their final pipe and
go to bed. And yet, so far was I beyond my tables, that all I needed was