The problem does not consist merely in the growth of the city. Such a growth in itself is a good thing and not a bad thing for the country. The problem consists in the growth of the city at the expense of the country; and, even where this is not the case, in so great an equality of growth in power and interest as to make the city more attractive than the country, and therefore apt to drain the country of the people who ought to live therein. The human side of the rural life problem is to make the career of the farmer and the career of the farm laborer as attractive and as remunerative as corresponding careers in the city. Now, I am well aware that the farmer must himself take the lead in bringing this about. A century and a quarter ago the wise English farmer, Arthur Young, wrote of the efforts to improve French wool: “A cultivator at the head of a sheep farm of 3,000 or 4,000 acres would in a few years do more for their wools than all the academicians and philosophers will effect in ten centuries.” It is absurd to think that any man who has studied the subject only theoretically is fit to direct those who practically work at the matter. But I wish to insist to you here—to you practical men, who own and work your farms—that it is an equally pernicious absurdity for the practical man to refuse to benefit by the work of the student. The English farmer I have quoted, Young, was a practical farmer, but he was also a scientific farmer. One reason why the great business men of to-day—the great industrial leaders—have gone ahead, while the farmer has tended to sag behind the others, is that they are far more willing, and indeed eager, to profit by expert and technical knowledge—the knowledge that can come only as a result of the highest education. From railways to factories no great industrial concern can nowadays be carried on save by the aid of a swarm of men who have received a high technical education in chemistry, in engineering, in electricity, in one or more of scores of special subjects. The big business man, the big railway man, does not ask college-trained experts to tell him how to run his business; but he does ask numbers of them each to give him expert advice and aid on some one point indispensable to his business. He finds this man usually in some graduate of a technical school or college in which he has been trained for his life work.