The advantage given by skill perpetuates skill from generation to generation through aptitude and superior training, and so the people of a neighborhood or a country may inherit such power in contrast with other regions. “Yankee ingenuity” has become proverbial through such natural extension. _Discipline._—Education serves the same purpose by acquisition of knowledge in such ways as to give wisdom in its application. It involves an exercise of intelligence to the establishing of sound judgment. Broader than skill in its range, it increases the possibilities of skill as storage of power. The skill of the surgeon would never have existed but for the brightening of his intelligence by education. The electrician’s training depends upon a broad foundation of education in knowledge of the matters he handles so dextrously. In farming, this source of stored up power has until very recently been ignored. While men in many professions were multiplying their individual power by spending youth in school, the farm boy would be simply trained at the plow, without the enlargement of practice in thinking required elsewhere. Such education has become at length, like skill, a requisite of each generation in order that our civilization may be maintained. For this the states build and the nation sustains agricultural colleges. _Character._—Just as important, though often overlooked in enumerating economic forces, is the acquired personal habit of self-control. Without it both skill and education avail but little, and it may do its work independently of both. “Tried and trusted” expresses our estimate of the importance of long practice of virtue in meeting obstacles. The formation of habits—personal, business and moral,—is a matter of time and discipline. It costs exertion through a series of years; but the power accumulated may be needed only once, in some great emergency. The character of the workman, the tradesman and the farmer enters more or less into the product of his toil and gives it value. Though I may not care from whence come the shoes I wear, or the butter I eat, I do care for the genuineness of both, for which I must depend upon the genuine character of the makers and sellers of both. This, too, is maintained from generation to generation by its successful use in acquiring both power and wealth. It cannot be had without the expenditure of time, energy and means of the fathers and mothers of one age upon their successors.