had been attracted to these institutions. The Civil War, in which many men of college age were engaged as soldiers, also hindered the early development of the land-grant colleges. It had proved particularly difficult to construct good agricultural courses. The teaching of chemistry, botany, and zoology and their relations to agriculture, and of practical systems of agriculture, principally by means of lectures, had been combined with manual labor on the college farms, which for the most part had had comparatively little educational value. The development of laboratory work in the natural sciences in which the students participated and the direction of the study of the sciences toward their applications to agriculture and other useful arts had thus far been the chief educational contribution of the land-grant colleges. The need of experimental inquiries to develop a body of scientifically tested knowledge which might be used as a basis for more thorough and satisfactory instruction in agriculture was beginning to be apparent. Neither the managers and teachers in the land-grant colleges nor the farmers were satisfied with their agricultural work. Economic conditions were developing which would turn the efforts of the land-grant colleges largely in the direction of the mechanic arts and keep the number of agricultural students at a relatively low level for a number of years pending the carrying on of agricultural experimentation on a broad scale and with large practical results.

These colleges were also about to show that while their systematic courses in agriculture were weak they could broadly aid agricultural progress by their contacts with large numbers of adult farmers in their societies and farmers' institutes and through the agricultural press.

Farmers' institutes were first held at the Kansas Agricultural College in 1868, by the Illinois Industrial University in 1870, the Iowa Agricultural College in 1871-72, and the University of Nebraska

in 1873-74.

THE EXPERIMENT STATION AND EXTENSION MOVEMENTS IN THE LAND-GRANT COLLEGES, 1873-1887

GENERAL ECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN THIS PERIOD

The great panic of 1873 was the culmination of a period of rapid expansion of agriculture, manufacturing, and railroad building. The capital of the country had too largely been locked up in speculative and legitimate enterprises which were giving little or no return. The efforts of the Federal Government to put money on a sound basis by contraction of the paper currency and the limitation of the coinage of silver brought about the difficulties which usually accompany deflation. The great fires in Boston and Chicago helped to make the financial situation unusually bad. The general result of the situation brought about by this panic was a great lowering of the prices of merchandise and agricultural products and of wages and salaries. There was an extensive redistribution of the wealth of the country and the reorganization of its business activities. A great contest arose regarding the use of silver and paper money as related to gold. It was decided to continue the coining of the silver dollar, giving it a weight of 4121⁄2 grains, but the amount of such coinage

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was definitely limited. The greenbacks were retained but not increased and on January 1, 1879, specie payment was resumed.

Protection of manufacturers through a tariff became a settled policy, under which the home market was very largely reserved for domestic goods. The growth in urban communities with greatly varied industries, the continuing expansion of agriculture, and the reconstruction of the South provided a constantly enlarging home market. Mechanic arts grew in variety and extent; the applications .of science to such arts became more and more numerous. By 1880 the annual value of manufactures in the United States had risen to over $5,000,000,000. There was also a great increase in the mining of coal, iron, silver, gold, petroleum, etc. Activity in railroad building was soon resumed after the panic of 1873. Between 1870 and 1880 the railroad mileage doubled and in the next 10 years grew from 93,296 to 163,597 miles. The largest part of this development was in the Central and Western States. Communication through the postal routes and telegraph lines was greatly extended, and in 1876 the telephone came.

To meet the needs of reviving industry, immigration was strongly encouraged. In 1879 the number of immigrants rose to 789,000 as compared with 460,000 in 1873. Combinations of capital in railroading and manufacturing increased greatly in number and extent and produced profound results in the industrial world. These combinations at first took the form of agreements between competitors to fix prices, limit output, or divide territory or profit. Then came the more substantial and permanent combinations known as "trusts," beginning with the Standard Oil Co. in 1882. When these were made illegal, "holding companies" were devised. The growth of large trusts was promoted by alliances with natural monopolies, especially railroads. The giving of rebates on freight charges to large shippers became very prevalent. The railroads themselves broke down competition with each other to a considerable extent through "pooling."

The transfer of the mechanical industries to large factories or organizations like the railroads and the increase of their management through corporations vitally affected the relations of industrial workers with their employers. Labor came to be looked upon more generally merely as a commodity, and its human relationships were too often ignored. After the Civil War wages did not increase as rapidly as prices. This led to the formation of unions by the locomotive engineers, bricklayers, iron and steel workers, and other laborers. In 1866 the National Labor Union was formed, but this was soon wrecked through its political activities. Then came the Knights of Labor. Begun in 1869, it was for 10 years a secret society and open on that account to much misrepresentation and attack. Its aims were "to bring within the folds of organization every department of productive industry, making knowledge a standpoint for action, and industrial and moral worth, not wealth, the true standard of national greatness." It wished "to secure to the workers the full enjoyment of the wealth they create, sufficient leisure in which to develop their intellectual, moral, and social faculties, all of the benefits, recreation, and pleasures of association" (11). The accom

plishment of many of its demands could be brought about only by legislative action, and it ultimately became entangled in politics. It was also unfavorably affected by disastrous strikes in 1877 and 1886. Its government was highly centralized and autocratic and this brought it into conflict with other labor organizations. Its greatest influence was exerted between 1880 and 1890. At one time it claimed a membership of over 700,000. When it declined its place was taken by the American Federation of Labor, distinctly a "confederation," in which each trade was organized separately and represented in the national body by its union. The federation aimed to deal only with matters of general interest to the unions.

Agriculture went on expanding after 1873 in spite of economic difficulty. Free public land and cheap private land in the West lured great multitudes of men to seek their fortunes by farming on virgin soils and under the freedom of pioneer conditions. The area of cultivated land spread beyond the region of adequate rainfall. The successful example of farming under irrigation which the Mormons had demonstrated prior to the Civil War stimulated attempts at irrigation elsewhere. Railroads and speculators widely advertised the advantages of irrigation. Between 1870 and 1880 a million acres were brought under irrigation ditches and then under the influence of the speculative boom the irrigated area was increased to 3,631,381 acres by 1889. The desert land act of 1877, under which 640 acres was offered at $1.25 an acre to the settler practicing irrigation, proved of chief benefit to the irrigation companies and to sheep and cattle ranchers, whose business was growing enormously during this period.

The rapid expansion of agriculture, while it gave employment to multitudes of men and made comparatively easy the passage from the status of farm laborer to that of farm owner, constantly tended toward overproduction of crops and livestock. The railroad building which accompanied the agricultural expansion outran the limits of safe business and led to charges for transportation which often seemed unfair to the agricultural people. The necessary sale of farm products through commission merchants, who were often far away and had few personal contacts with the farmers, created suspicions of unfair dealing which were in many cases justified. Federal taxation, which produced more revenue than the Government needed for ordinary expenses, and State and local taxation to provide for roads, schools, and other things required by new communities or in old communities by the rapidly expanding requirements of the new age, bore heavily on the agricultural people. If to these things was added a heavy burden of mortgages with high interest rates the farmer naturally felt that he did not have a fair deal in a country where wealth was tending to accumulate more and more in comparatively few hands. Though for a brief time after 1880 the farmers were somewhat more prosperous, the locking up of vast sums of money in farm lands and railroads again caused financial difficulties, culminating in the panic of 1884. At that time the price of wheat fell to 64 cents a bushel. Agriculture then remained in a depressed condition for a number of years.

THE FIRST MASS MOVEMENT OF FARMERS

American farmers had from colonial times lived comparatively isolated lives on separate farms, rather than in villages, and had prided themselves on their independence. Such societies as had arisen among them had had a small membership composed largely of the more wealthy and better educated men, many of whom united farming with other pursuits and were more or less influential in public affairs. It is an interesting fact that when the time was ripe for the first mass movement of American farmers to better their condition it was brought about through the activity of a very small number of this same type of men. And it is also noteworthy that it paralleled the attempt of the laboring men of that time to form a broad organization through a secret society, such as the Knights of Labor.

In 1866 when agricultural and other conditions in the South were giving the country much anxiety President Johnson consulted the United States Commissioner of Agriculture, Isaac Newton. The results was that Oliver Hudson Kelley (fig. 9), a native of Boston, Mass., who in 1849 had taken up farming at Ithaca, Minn., and was at this time a clerk in the Department of Agriculture, was sent South to study conditions there. He found that his membership in the masonic order made him an acceptable visitor to many southern people. This suggested to him that a secret farm organization with a ritual and different orders would be a good thing and when later he visited his niece, Miss Carrie A. Hall, in Boston, she persuaded him to include the membership of women in the plan for this organization. Returning to Washington as an employee in the Post Office Department, he formed the acquaintance of W. M. Ireland, John Trimble, and William Saunders, for many years in charge of the gardens and grounds of the Department of Agriculture. These men favored Kelley's project and he therefore elaborated his plan of organization and ritual. J. R. Thompson, A. B. Grosh, and F. M. McDowell were also "founders of the order." On December 4, 1867, the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry was organized, with Saunders as master and Kelley as secretary. The original objects of the grange were wholly educational and social.

In his first printed circular, November 1, 1867, Kelley stated that its main object is "to encourage and advance education in all branches of agriculture," and in the circular of February 3, 1868, "with regard to the modes of education, mention may be made of mental instruction through the reading of essays, and discussions, lectures, formation of select libraries, circulation of magazines, and other publications touching directly upon the main subject desired, namely, those inculcating the principles governing our operation in the field, orchard, and garden (38). Mr. Saunders, in 1870, said that

to increase the products of the earth by increasing the knowledge of the producer is the basis of our structure; to learn and apply the revelations of science as far as it relates to the farmer's products of the vegetable world, and to diffuse the truths and general principles of the science and art of agriculture, are the ultimate objects of our organization.

When Kelley went out in February, 1868, to organize granges and traveled across the country from Pennsylvania and New York

to his home in Minnesota he had very little success.

The farther

west he went the more he was reminded by the farmers that what they wanted was an organization to protect them against the injustices of railroads and middlemen in the transportation and selling of agricultural products and the buying of farm supplies and ma

chinery. He yielded to this demand and in a circular of September, 1868, broadened the objects of the grange, which now are "to advance education, to elevate and dignify the occupation of the farmer, and to protect its members against the numerous combinations by which their interests are injuriously affected." This made the organization of granges in Minnesota easier and by 1869 there was a State grange