This competition for nourishment is usually so sharp and continuous that mere existence or endurance rather than excellence or quality, seems to be the end and aim of natural law. Hence, the strong survive and the weak perish.
Beginnings of Agriculture. Here agriculture begins. By relieving plants of this intense competition by means of tillage, and by selecting the most promising for domestication, they are enabled to use all their energy for the development of those qualities which add to their intrinsic value, instead of expending it in the struggle for existence. Given, thus, free access to the soil and sunshine, with needful nourishment supplied and their fungous or parasitical enemies destroyed, the domesticated plants yield trustful obedience to the protecting hand of the husbandman. Freed altogether from the necessity of self-protection they become prolific and pour into the world's bread basket in marvelous abundance the seeds—a single one of which would suffice to answer Nature's law for the propagation of species. This surplus of yield for which each plant has need of but a single seed, and more especially this improvement of quality for which the plant has no concern, is Nature's reciprocal reward for having given her children gratuitously that protection which otherwise they would have had to provide for themselves.
Nor is animal life less susceptible of improvement. Between the animal wild and the animal domesticated—that is whether Nature-bred or man-bred—the range in quality is as marked as that which separates the savage from the philosopher.
Nature demands only strength, endurance; but man demands quality and excellence, and he proceeds scientifically to accomplish his purpose. By conscious design and a sort of mental architecture the animal to be is planned, and the picture thus conceived in the brain of the breeder becomes incarnated in the form, size and character of the animal. Not only is the animal created with the desired quality as to its parts and products, but its nature is transformed from fear and ferocity to that of trust and docility.
For example the descendants of the wild horse are not only changed from vicious brutes to trustful beasts of burden, but are also differentiated into many different breeds to meet the demands of strength, speed or endurance. Specimens of such breeds as the Belgian, Percheron or Hambletonian exist as monuments to the breeder's art no less renowned and for more useful purpose than anything in Nature, the likeness of which the sculptor has wrought in marble or the artist has transferred from life to canvass.
From the wild buffalo, presumably, the ideal strains of pedigree kine, for beef or dairy products, have been created as surely and even more scientifically than the sculptor has immortalized his ideals in granite or marble.
Thus animal life is to the skillful breeder as clay in the hands of the potter, and though a supersensitive and artificial generation may look upon this form of genius as vulgar, it nevertheless is God's work and the doers thereof are working with God. For without this incarnation of quality into plant and animal life the world's population could not supply its fundamental wants nor could civilization rise above the animal instincts in man.
The farmer, therefore, is a most important personage, and his vocation the most absolutely needful in all the world. The farmer is in very truth a creator, certainly a co-creator, improving Nature by the aid of science, just as the human mind and character are improved by means of education. And when the prejudice of the ages has been rolled away the name "farmer" will rank among the most envied names that enrich our mother tongue. Here, indeed, may be verified the saving: "The first shall be last and the last shall be first."
While we honor the sculptor, the painter or the poet whose genius partakes of the immortal, and yet satisfies no hungry mouth, some degree of honor might well be given to this other sort of genius which has multiplied human food beyond computation and has otherwise so largely mitigated the burdens of life.
Vocational Education. From the foregoing it is little wonder that the education of the masses is surely and rapidly gravitating from the classical to the utilitarian, from the formal to the vocational. The world's work must be done, and as those whose stewardship is the soil are compelled to render a combined physical and mental service in order to discharge their social obligations, they are entitled to education in harmony with the tasks awaiting them, to the end that they may work intelligently, hence joyfully.