labor. This is extensive farming, and it gives a lowering of the farmer's costs the same as the manufacturer gets a lowering of costs through the use of machinery, wherever possible, instead of

men.

The evil of bumper crops must at bottom, however, be laid in large measure to the farmer himself. The farming pursuit must be described as one which is in a highly unstable state, or, as sometimes more strongly put, in a state of genuine anarchy so far as production is concerned. The six million farmers of our Nation, loosely grouped into some dozen or more classes, according to their chief product, have only a faint sense of class unity. The independence, or, more properly speaking, isolation of farmers one from the other, has been a main element of pride to members of this pursuit from remote times. The control of the industry has been left to the bare operation of the laws of economics. In this subject it has been taught that an excess of output in one branch of agriculture will cause farmers to give up this branch and raise something else, or, in case of general over-production, turn to some new trade. The functional effects of price, as these sorts of results are called in economics, find their best examples in farming.

But there are many farmers who de sire to continue as farmers for a lifetime and do not want to pursue any other calling. So, too, the shift from one farm enterprise to another is no longer easy, since each crop requires its own outfit of machinery and of training, and these are no longer of slight expense. The case, indeed, is on all fours in farming with the case of the soft-coal industry. Here we have been taught during the past summer that the cause of our present bad state is the fact of too many competing coal mines. Anarchy in production is the rule in both industries. This leads to rivalries and mistakes in production, with the resulting attempts to charge high prices as a means of writing off the losses which come from wasteful production.

Doubtless, too, it may be said that the marketing or distribution of the farmer's products to the consumer leaves much to be desired. The ideal set by the California Citrus Fruit Exchange for many years, of "one orange to each member of every family in the land each day," is far from being an attained goal in the case of other farm products. The middlemen distributers are to blame for this, and their failure adds greatly to the naturally weighty evils of the bumper crop. The food middleman system, like its parent, commercialized agriculture, are both of recent origin, and the former has had in late years a degree of harsh criticism from the public which exceeds that vented on all the other trades put together. The food middleman, as his name suggests, plies between the farmer and the city consumer and, without doubt, performs a

real service, but in a back-handed way. He of course handles nothing for which he is not paid, and this shows at once the vital distinction that there is between food need on the part of consumers and food demand-demand always implying ability to pay.

On the other hand, he takes from the farmer only what he can sell at a profit, and this leaves much of a bumper crop as waste in its producer's hands. The paradox is therefore often seen of many people without sufficient food while much of this same food is wasting in farmers' fields not far away.

The middleman system, in short, has no programme by which its services are directed. Haphazard efforts are the rule, even in this vital task of feeding a nation, and as a result great wastes abound. The directness of interest and clearness of ends, on the other hand, with which mail is picked up at the farmers' doors and carried to its destination are widely different from the devious and halting practices which govern the distribution of food. During the war the middleman system of this country broke down and was unable to perform its functions. The Hoover system, though hastily got together and ill equipped, did much to show what could be done by a more deliberate and planned effort to take food from where it is grown to where it is to be consumed.

The remedy for the particular evil in farming which results in bumper crops takes on many forms. President Harding would have better means of spreading market and trade news to farmers so that they may know beforehand what the prospects are for a good demand. His own words upon the matter are as follows:

One of the most serious obstacles to the balancing of agricultural production lies in the lack of essential information. With instrumentalities for the collection and dissemination of useful information, a group of co-operative marketing associations would be able to advise their members as to the probable demand for staples, and to propose measures for proper limitations of acreage in particular crops.

A second remedy urges the increase of the exports of farm products to foreign countries. This policy was the key to the outcry among farmers two years ago for the revival of the War Finance Board. There was clamor even for direct loans from our Government to foreign countries so that they might make purchases of foodstuffs from our producers. The speedy upbuilding of the buying power of these countries shows little of promise, however, while, on the other hand, farming is in the most advanced state of any European pursuit. Farming, through the ease with which it may be restored, is said, widely, to have come back to an almost complete degree among our late foreign friends and foes.

With nations able to feed themselves in this way and with little means to buy, no trade may be hopefully set up, therefore, which will take off our farm surplus.

Farmers themselves have tried to remedy the situation by various sorts of forcible means. There have been dairymen's strikes and threats of cutting down crop areas. The Night Riders were successful to some extent in keeping down the tobacco acreage in Kentucky a few years ago, and the burning of a bale of cotton scheme in the South in 1914-15 lowered the supply of this commodity. The failure of these efforts has pointed out the remedy which is probably most practical for farmers in seeking to control "bumper crops," namely, organization.

Farmers have been, indeed, organized for marketing purposes into co-operative associations for some time past, and these business concerns have been very successful. As is well known, these farmers' associations, whether of the grain elevator, live stock, produce shipping, or creamery types, are merely joint efforts on the part of farmers for the purpose of giving a common business service to each of their members. The last Census shows that ten per cent of our farmers are members of these bodies and that the gross amount of sales made through these agencies was in the year 1919 in excess of $700,000,000. Cooperation in these groups is usually made upon a commodity basis, and not rarely the local units are federated into State organizations, of which the California Citrus Fruit Exchange is the bestknown type. Whether large or small, however, these agencies content themselves with taking the place of the local middleman. They take over the services of the David Harums among our middlemen class, but otherwise they make use of the marketing machinery of the land exactly as did their forebears.

Another type of farm organization, and one which has held the very center of the stage for the past few years, is the Farm Bureau. This grew out of the agricultural extension movement put on by the Federal Government nearly a decade ago. It was plain that the county farm agent, provided by this plan, would not be able to carry his message to each separate farm family within his charge and that organization of some sort must be set up. The Farm Bureau was the result, and possibly there is no better description of its nature than to say that it answers the purpose for each rural county that the well-known Chamber of Commerce does for the town and city. Although these too have been federated into State and even National societies and number their members by hundreds of thousands, the edge of the movement has been dulled somewhat by the extreme multiplicity of reforms which were undertaken.

The type of organization which goes much further than either of these is the

type, however, which has most of promise for the prevention of bumper crops. This is the type to which dairymen have committed themselves in the milk areas of most of our large cities. It is the type with which the raisin growers of California, the Burley tobacco growers of Kentucky, and the prune and apricot growers of California have identified themselves. It is the type made fully legal by the Capper-Volstead Act of the present Congress, subject only to such oversight as the Secretary of Agriculture may give. Farmers' organizations of this type go much further than the mere marketing of their products or the setting up of a bureau for promoting purposes; they undertake the control of production itself.

Perhaps the now legal-proof dairymen's leagues illustrate the aims and methods of this new type as fully as can be done by single concrete examples. Dairy milk has become in recent years a necessity to cities to a scarcely less degree than a water supply. It is a commodity which does not stand long shipment, and hence must be produced in the vicinity of the place of use. This, together with the restraints of the sani

tary tests laid down by the city, makes the matter of monopolizing a supply of milk fairly easy for the interested dairymen. Competition as a regulator of the dairymen pursuit breaks down, as it always does where co-operation is possible. The chaos and anarchy of the milk trade about our large cities which have filled much newspaper space during the past few years are surely a reproach upon competitive control. The leaguing of the dairymen into joint effort has been the remedy by which a stabilized milk trade has been brought about in recent years. Dairymen near our large cities, numbering in each case many thousands, sell their product as a single man as the result of this organization. They insist upon "the closed shop" plan so far as the city distributer's right to buy of non-league dairymen is concerned. Their league pledges give the control of the size of herds which each may own to the organization, so that the danger of an over-supply of milk is cut out. By a closely bound union of this sort the dairying industry has become stabilized and made to yield a profit. Further, when proper public supervision is given, the consumer is not overcharged for his

milk, while always having the assurance of a full supply of this needed food.

The farmers of to-day, in some branches of their pursuit, are in the throes of the economic changes which overtook the laboring classes and the more capitalized industries three or four decades ago. They have felt the joys of product "pooling," of "collective bargaining," and of intensive co-operation, which these interests were denied by the anti-pooling, anti-agreement, and anti-trust laws of this period. During the war some potent object-lessons were given by the Government as to the gains which are possible through production according to a programme. The joint system of railways, the single food and coal control, and the unified labor and factory power of this time spoke loudly for the efficiency which comes from using the "get-together" plan in industry. A production programme, in short, more than anything else, is the need of our farmers at the present time. They would be stupid indeed, with the facilities given by our modern means of transport and communication, not to take advantage of organization in order to cope with the evils of bumper crops.

HERE were brave men before Agamemnon; but they did nothing that secured lasting record. There were voyagers who visited America before Columbus; but they did not open the continent to general and permanent settlement. There were steamboat makers before Fulton, and telegraph inventors before Morse; but they did not bring those devices into practical use.

There were in like manner bacteriologists before Pasteur; but none of them achieved results of epochal importance, or even realized the significance of what they did accomplish. We must honor them, of course, for what they did. Leeuwenhoek as early as 1673, using only a single lens, discovered microorganisms-a veritable landmark of ience. Inspired by this, Plenciz, a cen

tury later, conceived the theory that diseases were caused by such organisms, or at least were associated with them, and that there was a separate and specific bacterium for each disease. He was thus very close to a great truth, but he was unable to demonstrate his theory or to act upon it. The development of the compound microscope, scarcely a hundred years ago, greatly promoted bacterial research. Bassi in 1832 discovered that a disease of silkworms was accompanied by what he regarded as a minute vegetable growth; but he was unable to determine whether that growth was the cause or a result of the disease. A few years later Ehrenberg enumerated no fewer than sixteen different kinds of micro-organisms; Schoenlein found a minute parasite in the skin

disease known as favus, and Malmsten found a similar growth in barber's itch. Cohn, whose researches extended through many years (from 1853 to 1875), divided bacteria into two classes: the spherical cocci and the rod-shaped bacilli. All of these and others preceded Pasteur. Most of them were botanists, who regarded the micro-organisms as mere vegetation. Not one of them had any vision of the relation of their discoveries to human life and health, or of the development of a great system of therapeutics and prophylaxis. That was reserved for Louis Pasteur.

He began work chiefly as a chemist and as a student and practitioner of what we may call the mechanics of chemistry. His first important researches and discoveries were in crystallography and po

larization; apparently as far as possible from biology. Yet from observing the effect of polarized light upon crystals of tartaric acid his transcendent vision swept through the whole gamut of science and beheld as its goal the elimination of all communicable diseases from the world!

His study of tartaric-acid crystals-in processes of wine manufacture-led him directly to the study of fermentation, which at that time was one of the most obscure of processes, understood by nobody. Perhaps the theory nearest to the truth was that of Cagnaird-Latour, who held that beer yeast was a vegetable product. In this he was supported by Schwann and Kuetzing. But Berzelius contradicted him, insisting that fermentation was due to what he described as catalytic force; and Liebig also condemned his notions, insisting that the process in question was purely mechanical and had nothing to do with life, either animal or vegetable. In such division of what was then the foremost scientific opinion of the world, it was not to be wondered at that Claude Bernard in despair dismissed the whole subject as hopelessly obscure.

Pasteur, however, regarded obscurity as something to be enlightened and an obstacle as something to be overcome. His rule of action was to "prove all things" by practical and precise experiment. So he presently was able to demonstrate that fermentation in all its forms was not a mechanical but a biological process, and was a phenomenon not of vegetable but of animal life. This led straight to a battle royal over abiogenesis. Long before Harvey had propounded the great truth, Omne vivum ex ovo or ex vivo; or, All life comes from living germs. But he never proved it. He could not prove it. And for all the years after him until Pasteur's time belief in spontaneous generation widely prevailed. Dead matter through processes of fermentation or putrefaction or otherwise was supposed to be transformed into living matter. Obviously, there was there could be-no more important problem than this in the whole domain of biological science; indeed, in cosmogony itself. Many great scientists devoted themselves to it: Spallanzani, Schulze, Schwann, Schroeder, Dusch, and others. But Pasteur and Pouchet were the supreme protagonists, the one on the one side, the other on the other, in the greatest duel in the history of science. The result was the complete demonstration and confirmation of Harvey's law of the origin of life-that, and the conception of Pasteur's transcendent vision of the elimination from the world of all zymotic plagues.

I shall not undertake to review even in brief synopsis his gigantic work on the etiology of communicable diseases, of the prevention of infection, and on prevention or cure by means of inoculation. To the first and third of these achievements he devoted himself, leaving the second to his illustrious contem

porary and part disciple, Lister, whom he had inspired and taught by his researches into fermentation. Had it not been for Pasteur, there would have been none of the achievements of Lister. In like manner, from Pasteur's researches and demonstrations proceeded, not only his own achievements against pebrine, anthrax, rabies, and what not; but also those of Neisser, Hansen, Koch, Roux, Yersin, Metchnikoff, Behring, Kitasato, Haffkine, Finlay, Ross, Wright, Semple, and their compeers in combating glanders, tetanus, diphtheria, typhoid, cholera, yellow fever, malaria, bubonic plague, leprosy, pneumonia, and other ills that flesh is heir to. There was an old-time epigram

Si Lyra non lyrasset,

Lutherus non saltasset. There may be some question as to the influence which Nicholas de Lyra exercised upon the Reformation. There can be none as to that which Louis Pasteur exerted upon the whole vast and still expanding science of bacteriopathology and bacteriotherapy.

That was and is the meaning, the significance, of Pasteur to the world, in terms of material science and of human health and life. Yet as the centenary of his birth (December 27, 1822) approaches there comes to mind a still loftier significance, further reaching and more enduring, since it has to do, not alone with the material, but also with the intellectual and the spiritual domain of man. And that higher significance is threefold.

First, vision. Conspicuously and supremely above his forerunners and his contemporaries, Pasteur was a man of vision. One of the eminent scholars of our own day has said that if a man has not vision he can never be a great scientist. Assuredly, he can never be supremely great. Thousands of persons before Galileo saw the lamp swinging in the church at Pisa, but only he had the vision to perceive in it an ocular demonstration of a great natural law. Thousands before Newton had seen apples fall from trees to the ground, but it was reserved for his transcendent vision to see in that familiar phenomenon the principle which controlled the innumerable spheres of the immeasurable universe. So, while many others perceived the phenomena of fermentation and putrefaction and the myriad teeming micro-organisms therein, it required the vision of Pasteur to see in them the factors at once of disease and of health, of death and of life, and the assured highroad to conquest over the deadliest of pestilences.

Second, unity. I have recalled the fact that he began work as a chemist, as far removed as possible from biology. Indeed, he was for that reason at first reluctant to undertake the bacterial commission which Dumas urged upon him. But from the chemistry of crystals and of light he made his consistent way through organic chemistry and so into biology, demonstrating the essential con

nection between the two and disclosing the reciprocal influences of chemistry upon biology and of biology upon chemistry. No man ever contributed more to recognition of the coherent unity of science. Or perhaps it would be better to say the harmony of science; for mechanical, chemical, and biological processes are not identical, though they are all directly interrelated.

Third, faith. There never was a more timely or more suggestive coincidence in human history than that of Pasteur's contemporaneity with Darwin and Huxley and Haeckel and their colleagues in the purely materialistic exploitation of the philosophy of evolution. Darwin himself probably never relinquished spiritual faith; but a host of others, strong in the strength of his great name, went to extremes that he never would have sanctioned in proclaiming an irremediable antagonism between science and religious faith-extremes culminating in the monstrous proposition that, even though there was no possibility of proving that spontaneous generation ever had occurred or could occur, yet "it must be so, for otherwise we should be compelled to believe in God"! Amid such counsels and such propaganda it was indescribably impressive that Pasteur, the peer of the foremost scientists of his age, and the superior of all others in that department of scientific research and demonstration which was most pertinent and essential to the determination of the controversy between science and faith, stood resolutely and inflexibly on the side of spiritual and Christian faith. Perhaps I should say that he stood for faith, but not against science. For here again his marvelous vision was triumphant. He saw that between true faith and true science there was not, there could not be, conflict or controversy. For here again his principle of unity, or of harmony, prevailed. Just as all departments of science-mechanical, chemical, biological-so far as they were true must be in perfect accord, so science, so far as it was true, and faith, so far as it was true, must also be in exact harmony. Others before him had believed this. Guyot as a geologist and Gray as a botanist had declared it. But it was reserved for Pasteur as a biologist, and therefore concerned with the very highest phases of science, not only to believe it and to declare it, but, so far as was humanly possible, to demonstrate it; at any rate, to demonstrate it to a degree quite irrefutable by his opponents.

Such was the threefold significance of the immortal sage who was born into the world a century ago-the harmony of science in all its parts, the harmony between material science and spiritual faith, and the application of the profoundest principles of science to the healing of the nations, so that men might have life and have it more abundantly. That is what Louis Pasteur meant and means and will ever me

the world.

66

BY EARL CHRISTMAS

"W

HERE do we go from here?" The familiar question of war time popped up in a discussion among some disabled soldiers at the Minnesota School of Agriculture last winter.

They were being trained in agricultural pursuits there at the expense of the Government, just as thousands of other young men throughout the country who were disabled in the war are being prepared for new places of usefulness in society.

But one day, not far away, they would finish their allotted period of training and be graduated. What could they do then? That was the burning question.

True, they would have had three years of training in a good agricultural school, at these former dough boys wanted

some more practical results. Unless they got something else, they reasoned, they would be only educated farm-hands when their training was over. Now the prospect of being farm-hands, even educated farm-hands, did not appeal to these former soldiers.

Then some one sprang the big idea. They would become landowners and take the rest of their training farming their own land. It sounded fine. Most of the men in the group had come from the farms at the call of war, and the suggestion that each go back to the land as the owner of a farm of his own had a genuine appeal.

Buy a farm, yes; but how? Purchasing farms in these days of $200 and $300 an acre land requires money, and dis

abled soldiers certainly are not capitalists.

But there were pioneering spirits in that little group. One of them thought of the cut-over lands.

In northern Minnesota, as in northern Wisconsin and Michigan, there are millions of acres of these lands. Once they were covered by great forests, but the ax of the lumberman and the red tongue of fire have exacted a heavy toll. Amid the stumps and wasted timber new trees are growing up in many places. Often there is a tangled mass of brush, old timber, and new vegetation.

In other sections no young trees have come up, as if to leave the cemetery of the forest inviolate. Here one finds acres and acres of stumps or great charred wastes with the blackened trunks of trees still standing like shadowy ghosts of the forest that was.

To the settler the cut-over country offers a fight. In it one finds perhaps the last frontier. Far up in these cutover lands men are struggling against great odds to clear farms in the wilderness, just as men of another generation wrested from the forest now prosperous farming communities farther south. But men have a way of persevering, and the brush line is constantly being pushed farther north.

The disabled soldiers at the Minnesota school decided to make the fight. They would settle on adjoining tracts of land. That would prevent the isolation which too often is the lot of the settler in the north country, and they could help each other in the land clearing. Soon a committee was on the hunt for a location.

After many disappointments, a suitable tract was found near McGrath, Minnesota. Representatives of the Veterans' Bureau and the College of Agriculture looked it over, and the purchases followed. Some thirty veterans bought farms in the community, ranging in size from forty to eighty acres. Most of them had little or no money except their monthly checks from the Government, running from $80 to $150 a month, but easy payments were arranged with the owner of the land. In some cases the initial payment was only $1. Earnestness of purpose was a greater consideration. The monthly payments ranged from $20 to $50 a month. The cost of the land varied from $20 to $25 an acre.

Thus Veteransville, Minnesota, came into being. The former soldiers gave that name to the little settlement about which they are developing their farms. Formerly it bore the name of White Pine, but a petition has been forwarded

to the Post Office Department asking that the name be changed.

Veteransville is a town of veterans. All the men who live in and around it were wounded, gassed, or otherwise incapacitated in service.

On April 7, just five years after the beginning of the war, the former doughboys arrived at Veteransville, and, armed with the grubbing hoe and the ax, began a new and perhaps greater fight in their careers. Soon warlike explosives designed for blowing up the strongholds of the Germans were set to work blow ing up the deeply intrenched stumps.

OUT TO HIS SORROW

Reveille would sound at 5:30 A.M., and soon after the veterans would be on the firing line. All summer they kept it up. No retreats, no replacements, no rest camp. At times it looked discouraging, but nobody quit voluntarily.

When fall came, each man had five acres of his farm cleared and ready for the plow. Old settlers in the community were amazed. Many of them had spent five years in the cut-over country without getting as much done.

Moreover, most of the veterans had raised all the potatoes, vegetables, and garden stuff they needed. Knute Loth

berg had a good crop of corn, part of it planted on land cleared this year. Incidentally, that is getting results pretty fast. No wonder old settlers in the community were amazed at the way those soldiers did things!

When I visited it this fall, Veteransville was a humming center of industry. The clearing work was going on full blast. Log houses were being erected in little clearings in the woods.

A former soldier led the way down a narrow path. He said it would be a walk of a mile or two. We walked on along the winding footpath, and at