No growth of cities, no growth of wealth, can make up for any loss in either the number or the character of the farming population.  We of the United States should realize this above almost all other peoples.  We began our existence as a nation of farmers, and in every great crisis of the past a peculiar dependence has had to be placed upon the farming population; and this dependence has hitherto been justified.  But it can not be justified in the future if agriculture is permitted to sink in the scale as compared with other employments.  We can not afford to lose that preeminently typical American, the farmer who owns his own medium-sized farm.  To have his place taken by either a class of small peasant proprietors, or by a class of great landlords with tenant-farmed estates would be a veritable calamity.  The growth of our cities is a good thing but only in so far as it does not mean a growth at the expense of the country farmer.  We must welcome the rise of physical sciences in their application to agricultural practices, and we must do all we can to render country conditions more easy and pleasant.  There are forces which now tend to bring about both these results, but they are, as yet, in their infancy.  The National Government through the Department of Agriculture should do all it can by joining with the State governments and with independent associations of farmers to encourage the growth in the open farming country of such institutional and social movements as will meet the demand of the best type of farmers, both for the improvement of their farms and for the betterment of the life itself.  The Department of Agriculture has in many places, perhaps especially in certain districts of the South, accomplished an extraordinary amount by cooperating with and teaching the farmers through their associations, on their own soil, how to increase their income by managing their farms better than they were hitherto managed.  The farmer must not lose his independence, his initiative, his rugged self-reliance, yet he must learn to work in the heartiest cooperation with his fellows, exactly as the business man has learned to work; and he must prepare to use to constantly better advantage the knowledge that can be obtained from agricultural colleges, while he must insist upon a practical curriculum in the schools in which his children are taught.  The Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce and Labor both deal with the fundamental needs of our people in the production of raw material and its manufacture and distribution, and, therefore, with the welfare of those who produce it in the raw state, and of those who manufacture and distribute it.  The Department of Commerce and Labor has but recently been founded but has already justified its existence; while the Department of Agriculture yields to no other in the Government in the practical benefits which it produces in proportion to the public money expended.  It must continue in the future to deal