Hard, grinding, back-breaking labor, often with surprisingly meager returns, and in some seasons with total crop failure, has been in the past the bitter lot of the husbandman. Many a farm boy has thus had the courage crushed out of him in early teens and has ignominiously retreated to the city. Many a farmer's wife has grown prematurely old and has slaved herself to death, leaving her children and her home to a younger successor. These conditions of course still continue even in the new age. Great numbers of farmers are still hopelessly poor, many of them needlessly so, through ignorance, slovenly management, laziness or willful unprogressiveness. But the rural moss-back is being laid upon the shelf with other fossils and soon will possess only historical interest. Great organized effort is being made to redeem him by the gospel of scientific farming before he dies, and the effort is by no means vain. III. Increased Popular Intelligence. The new rural civilization, however, is by no means a mere matter of methods. The farmer himself has been growing more intelligent. County agricultural societies, first organized in 1810, set the farmers to thinking. Many farm journals have contributed widely to the farmers' education. But in the past twenty years many agencies have united in what has been a great rural uplift. The government's department of agriculture, the experiment stations established in each state, the better-farming trains with their highly educative exhibits, the countless farmers' institutes for fruitful discussions, the extension work of state universities, the local and traveling libraries, and especially the agricultural colleges, through their short courses in the winter, their stimulating and instructive bulletins, their great variety of extension service through their territory, are among the many agencies for popular education in country districts which are becoming thoroughly appreciated and highly effective. In a great variety of ways a genuine rural culture is being developed, with its own special characteristics and enduring values. All this is helping to make country life vastly worth while. [Illustration: This picture illustrates school garden work at the Macdonald Consolidated School, Guelph, Canada, E. A. Howes, Principal. The time is June.] [Illustration: The same garden at harvest time, in September.] This increased culture among country people is a great factor in the new rural civilization which must be given due consideration. It is this which is overcoming rural narrowness and provincialism. Herein is great hope for the future of the open country as a worthy home for people of the finest tastes and of genuine culture. This important topic will be considered in detail in Chapter VI, under Education for Country Life. IV. The New Social Consciousness.