Then I tried the arts of persuasion. I pointed out that what I wanted he could give me, not as a farmer, but as a legislator who had taken an interest in the great western country and its development, through his term of public service in the House of Representatives, as well as in the Senate. I saw no inconsistency in his posing as a farmer if he chose to do so, because I knew of his ownership of three splendid and large Nebraska farms. His intimates know that he dons overalls and a straw hat in the busy season when Congress is not in session and works on his farms to keep down his avoirdupois. But he would have none of it. He insisted that the people of his state had quite enough "farmer posing" and if he were to be put forward in such a light there would be no interview.

Having solemnly asserted that he was to be reflected in the light of a legislator solely, he turned to my suggestion:

"Tell me of the diversification of crops in the West; what it has done for the great country lying out in the direction. of the Rocky Mountains and what it promises to do?"

When he answered he showed rare acquaintance with the subject for one so strenuously denying agricultural leanings or occupation.

"First of all," he began, "let us understand what we mean by diversification. Naturally the first thought that comes to the mind of anyone is the introduction of new kinds of grains or grasses with which to rejuvenate the soil and make farming more profitable. That is all right, but true diversification in farming contemplates something more. It includes the greatest of all accomplishments of the past few years, and that is the adapting of the old, well-known grains and products to the new country.

"Here is what I mean. I remember a neighbor who came to Nebraska from Pennsylvania and saw our early efforts to raise corn. He told us to just wait until he sent back to Pennsylvania and got some of his old seed corn and he would show us the kind of corn to raise. He got the corn and the results were too piti ful to recount."

"What, to your mind, is the most notable thing crop diversification has done. for the western country?" I asked.

"The introduction of alfalfa alone has

pushed possible or profitable living back a hundred miles into the semi-arid regions of the West," was in part his reply to my query.

Bearing in mind the complications to which I once introduced the present Secretary of Agriculture by quoting him in a reference to the "semi-arid regions of Kansas," I thought to entrap Senator Burkett, for I innocently inquired:

"Senator, what would you call the semiarid regions of the West ?"

He detected the trap and smiled goodnaturedly in replying with evasion:

"You may say that the semi-arid region is not distinctly marked, but that it begins somewhere in the general vicinity of the 100th parallel."

This turned him from the main

topic for a moment. Pulling a footrest toward him, so he could sit at his ease, he pushed his bulging dress shirt back behind the edges of his vest, and continued:

"In that great country included in the States of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Indian Territory and Texas, there are three phases of the work of diversification which the Department of Agriculture is carrying on with marked success. First, they find a crop capable of being adapted to the particular region and then adapt it. Second, they strive to develop native crops through breeding and selection. The third problem is to discover the best means of conserving the moisture in the soil. This is secured in part through rotation.

"Alfalfa takes perhaps first place in the efforts for crop diversification because of its long roots, which go ten or twelve, and sometimes as deep as twenty-five feet. But even alfalfa has been the subject of many experiments to increase its drought-resisting qualities and to adapt it to the alkali properties in the soil.

"The importation of macaroni wheat, and its cultivation by our farmers of the western country, constitutes no unimportant factor in securing crop diversification. Six years ago the Department of Agriculture, at an expense of $10,000, imported the macaroni wheat seed that last year brought a crop valued at $15,000,000. The Swedish select oat was brought into this country by the Government and last year in Wisconsin alone they raised 15,000,000 bushels of the product. Going

further west, and even crossing the Rocky Mountains, the cultivation of the sugar beet has been most important in the crop diversification movement. There have been so many conflicting claims as to the merits and possibilities of sugar beet cultivation that one borders on the controversial in venturing anything in relation to the subject. I will content myself with saying that sugar beet culture has passed the purely experimental stage and now needs only Yankee ingenuity to make it profitable in competition with cheaper foreign labor. There are two things we are working on now. One of these is to raise the right kind of seedlings and the other to decrease the cost of labor.

"We are succeeding in both directions. We are now increasing the proportion of sugar in the beets and getting a seedling that will soon make it unnecessary to go to Germany and pay a half-million dollars a year to get our seed. In the effort to reduce the cost of labor we are striving for a plant that will have but one plantlet instead of the numerous plantlets, which now require hand-pruning to get one hardy plant for cultivation. It used to be that the single plantlet was found in less than one-tenth of one per cent. of our seed, but through tireless effort we now have seed that produces 35 per cent. of the single plantlets."

Senator Burkett has acquired something of a reputation for stubbornness or, as would describe it more charitably, firmness. It grows out of his strong convictions on all subjects on which he expresses an opinion. He reaches his conclusions. only after exhaustive investigation and hence is most fixed in them. In his experience in the House of Representatives this was often demonstrated. Once his little daughter was so ill that he had to sit beside her crib throughout the night. Beneath the night lamp he placed books and pamphlets bearing on the organization of the Census Bureau. The next day, after his all-night "cramming," he came onto the floor of the House so ready with facts and figures and details, and so opposed to the form of the bill championed by Representative Albert J. Hopkins, now a colleague of Burkett in the Senate, that single-handed he defeated the measure and sent it back to Mr. Hopkins' committee to be reconsidered and recast.

That was a time when he was young

in

years and younger in legislative experience. He was one of Mr. Joseph G. Cannon's "colts" in the House. Mr. Cannon was then chairman of the great committee on appropriations and not Speaker. He assigned his "colts"-young and vigorous, hard-working men of his committee-to watch the appropriations of other committees. It was the duty of these "colts" to study the details of all the great supply bills that came from such committees as that on military affairs, on Indian affairs or post offices and post roads. If they found a proposition which had been rejected by the committee on appropriations it was the duty of the "colts" to fight it on the floor of the House. Thus the young men were often pitted against the old, gray-haired floor fighters in many a stirring contest. Burkett found that his surest weapon was a mastery of detail. He has never fallen out of the habit of so posting himself, on a subject he proposes to discuss, as to be at a loss for fact or figure with which to meet his antagonist.

This characteristic was known to me, so I turned him from detail with the question:

"What is the general theory of crop diversification ?"

"The whole theory is summed up in the expression: Crop diversification prevents soil deterioration. Broad as the statement may seem, it can be asserted that ground can be so handled that it will be as rich and possess as much power of production at the end of twenty years, if the crops on it are properly diversified, as when cultivation first began. The selection of the right sort of crops, planted in the proper scientific sequence, contains the secret of it all. The emigration from the states of the North and Northwest into Manitoba is not due to really permanently impoverished land there, but to the lack of diversification of crops. The farmers of our borderland found that through successive years of wheat production they had robbed the soil of certain of its qualities. Rather than restore these qualities. to the land, they sell their land and take up the cultivation of the virgin soil of the further North. Intelligent diversification by those who succeed to this land will make the great wheat states of the Northwest permanently prosperous and even greater in future than they have been in the past."

Ignorance.

I

OLLY is what others like to do. Wisdom is what we like to do. Righteousness is what we like to make others do. Happiness is to do what we like and to make others do as we do.

have taken a brief for ignorance, and I admit the fitness. Is ignorance bliss? Is it folly to be wise?

The chief end of man is happiness. Happiness is Nature's gift to this life. It is the dower of which most are cheated by others and many cheat themselves. One finds happiness on the mountain top; another in the valley; and yet another in poking about in a garbage heap. But to each, happiness is to live his own life in his own way, and it is a natural right with which no one has any business to interfere so long as his own rights or the rights of others are not forcibly assailed. Happiness is to live in harmony with the great universal laws, each one filling his own desires, be they good or bad. It is better for the human race that a man surfeit in sin to the ripest fruits thereof, than that he be made righteous in chains, robbed of that free exercise of his will power which in the eternal plan is the only power by which men have risen or can rise, as it is the only means by which they can fall.

Undoubtedly there is wrong as well as right. Undoubtedly the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. Undoubtedly there is degeneration as well as a splendid evolution, and undoubtedly in all this the particular welfare of any particular individual, forced upon him against his ability and natural inclination, is of small consequence as compared with the great good to the whole race, which permits the law of the sur

vival of the fittest to have its natural and perfect play. And who is there that shall say at all times and forever what is sin? If we take away from sin all that which is the mere opinion of man, how much is there left? How much of what we condemn in others can we be sure is really sin in the eye of a superior creator who created the sin as well as the sinner? There is none of us so perfect a judge for another as is he himself. A humble conception of the above truth is great knowledge.

But what is ignorance? It is an absence of knowledge. But of what knowledge? I believe it to be verily true that all knowledge of truth is good, for such knowledge is in harmony with the eternities, but a knowledge of untruth is a worse ignorance than a lack of knowledge of the truth. If a man believes the sun is a ball of red hot iron passing over the earth from east to west, he is even more ignorant than the man who does not know anything about the sun, and if a man thinks the earth is a vast level plane, he is more ignorant than the man who does not know that the earth is an oblate spheroid. And the man who believes the earth is round, but knows nothing of its size, is thought to be more ignorant than the man who believes it to be an oblate spheroid with a greater axis of about eight thousand miles. Or, if one believes that lightning is the thunderbolt of Jove, he is ignorant. But, so, also, is he who does not know that lightning is electricity. But if a man does not believe that lightning, or electricity, is a form of ethereal mat

ter in molecular wave motion, we don't know whether he is ignorant or not. So there are infinite degrees of knowledge and ignorance, and all knowledge, or ignorance, is relative. If a South Sea Islander would attempt to use a chip of ice as a setting for his nose-ring, he would be as ignorant as the preacher who tried to make and throw a boomerang (not merely verbal). But if the preacher were in the country where to make and throw a boomerang or a spear was a necessity of life, his ignorance of these life-giving arts would be a greater ignorance than not to know that ice was frozen water. And the gods. Ah, the gods! What shall we say of them? Is there anything pertaining to them which may be classed as knowledge or ignorance? When shall we be able to say we know the truth about the gods? They who believed in Baal and they who believed in Ammon each thought the other ignorant and worthy of destruction, and we now know they were both ignorant, and ignorant, also, they who believed in Zeus and Aphrodite. But what shall we say of those who believe in Jehovah and Moses on Mount Sinai, and what shall we say of those who believe in Buddah as the immaculate incarnate deity, and what shall they say of those who believe in Jesus, the immaculately conceived Son of God?

He who believes that a broken bone will retake its former place by force of will power, is ignorant, for he is contradicted by the visible facts of Nature, and he who believes that there is no healing. force in mental influences is also ignorant. But what shall we who persecute them say of the followers of Mary Baker Eddy? Are they ignorant, or we, and what of him who believes that all is matter, even the soul, and that it is no more wonderful, primarily, than wireless telegraphy? Is he ignorant or not? He who believes that milk is soured by malicious fairies and that the insane are the dwelling place of evil spirits, and he who would burn an old woman as a witch is today ignorant, yet formerly it was not so, and what shall we say today of him who believes in ghosts and the communion of the living with the spirits of the dead? In truth, every man is the author of his own God, and as cattle which herd together drink at the same pool, so men who herd together have

the same gods, and to these people all other gods are impostors.

From which I conclude that ignorance is relative to time and place and is declared by the current of common belief. What a person firmly believes is to him true, even though it be a delusion, but very truth itself, so far as we may perceive it, is that which, without any exception, forever harmonizes with itself and every other manifestation of the universe perceived by our senses.

Nor does knowledge indicate mentality -great, original brain power; nor lack of knowledge, lack of brain power. One man may gather a handful of polished pebbles by the seashore, yet not be so strong as the young savage who brings pearls from beneath the waves. A man may know nothing of French, or German, or any other language but his own, and he may read, write and speak that in picturesque but most unfashionable style, and yet be a genius, grasping and digesting all things; succeeding in all things; and another may know many languages and have much acquired knowledge and be incapable of earning a hundred dollars a month. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman were both scorned for their small Latin and less Greek. I doubt if Homer knew any language but his own; and Henry James, who knows English to the painful point of tedious accuracy, does not exceed Homer in his knowledge of human nature. A man may be able to weigh and measure the stars and yet too foolish to be trusted alone in a great city, or he may have milked millions from the lamb-like public and not know which breed of cows gives the buttermilk, or whether eggs are the fruit of the egg-plant. He may know the points of the compass and why there is leap year, and still believe in the protective tariff and that representative government is really representative of the

masses.

Certainly, all knowledge of truth is good to have, but it is better not to know so much, if so much we know is not true. And what is Truth? It is that demonstrated by perceptible facts and which never varies. Knowledge can be classed as of two sorts, common or ordinary and extraordinary. Or, again, of two sorts: The positively useful and that not so useful, and so we may perhaps say that he,