The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1901-10-29


eight men and eight horses with
plows used in the last generation.
For farm purposes an old-fashioned
we'll with sweep and bucket is better
than a spring a quarter of a mile off.
A pump is better still, but best of
all is a windmill with tank, a
hydaulic ram, or, in the hill country,
a line of pipe. There are thousands
of families in our State to-day that
carry water by hand for all domestic
purposes, an eighth o. a quarter of a
mile. On our mountain farms the
use of pipes is very rare. Year after
year man and beast suffer for water,
which might be had in perpetual
flow, in barn and kitchen, in ex-
change for a little knowled 20, a little
mechanical skill and a few hundred
feet of iron pipe. But our people as
a rule have neither the knowledge
nor the skill. 1t would be strange
we're it otherwise.
For two hundred years the negro
has been our sole machine Sambo
and Dinah have been for the South
cook stove, hydraulic ram harvester,
shredder and husker, telephone and
telegraph. But Sambo and Dinah
cannot compete with modern ma
chinery. The negro is not an i'm
proved machine. Put him in the
Patent Office beside u power press, a
Mergenthaler type setter, a Deering
Harvester, a Mccormick shredder
and husker, or a De Laval cream
separator, and you will find him out
classed at every point, Improvement
after Improvement made on our be-
loved darkey, without even the con
ISOLATION of right so sue for infringe
ment of patent. No, the negro can
not compete with improved modern
machinery and the South, relying
upon the negro, cannot compete with
other sections employing better ma
chinery. What then is the remedy?
We must teach our children how to
work; how to work skilfully and
economically how TO save time,
labor and material by the use of
tools and machinery.
Under our present system of edu
cation boys and girls are educated
away from skilled labor. How few
of them are taught the use of tools,
much less machinery how few of
them can bottom q chair, repair a
look, replace a broken door panel,
put a water back in the kitchen
stove, put a new valve in the pump,
cut threads on pipe aud make joints,
sharpen the moving blade, put a
head on a bolt, make a new wagon
body, put on a horse shoe, make a
new single tree, put in a spoke, put
on a tire, replace broken glass, make
a new gate, forge an open link,
temper steel, build a chimney, draw
plans for a barn, put in tile drains,
survey hillside ditches, construct
silos, repair harness, and do the
thousand and n things that every
farmer must do for himself, or hire
some one else to do for him at very
great expense, or, at still greater ex-
pense, leave undone. Instead of
learning to do these things, to be
skilled with hands, Observant with
eyes and inventive with brains, our
children IRE given endless lessons in
geography and history and rhetoric
and literature, lessons which they
learn with difficulty and forget with
ease
We are so unfamiliar with ma.
chinery, skilled labor and technical
knO wledge than many of leading
men, even our leading educators, re-
gard industrial education as a fad,
or a sham. Let them open their
eyes, and contemplate the n sent
and the future, instead of gazing for
over at the past. Let them behold
the little State of Massachusetts
with more institutions for industrial
education than the entire South let
them @ her textile schools, her
schools of design, schools of art,
schools of technology, manual train.
ing institutions, trade s3oOols, poly
teohnic institutes, sohool1 Of applied
science, andinstitutes ut technology
let them see industrial departments
in all her city high schools, and and
her entiro public school system made
strong, practical and profitable by