First of all, let me send you my affectionate greetings. I have been down in the valley and I am now on the mountain top. My surgeon says that within a week I may go where I please. I think I haven't felt quite as well, and even chipper, as I do today, for more than a year.
I am greatly interested in the Gedney Farm Conference and Dr. Staige Davis almost decided to let me go up to be with you, but after a consultation it seemed not quite wise.
I have somehow received an impression that the subject up for discussion is: "What would you do if you had all the money you want?" It reminds me of an old story doubtless familiar to you all. Someone asked a fellow-man: "What would you do if you had a million dollars?" "Do?" he said, "I wouldn't do a d___ thing!" That is the trouble with money. It is so difficult when we have a lot of money in trust, to know what to do with it in order best to promote the well-being of mankind.
Flexner read to me the first draft of his memorandum. I find myself in agreement with most that he says. When he says: "Ideas are more important than money", he states a truth which all of us recognize. I would be just a little more specific and say that we want:
(1) Germinal ideas. By this I mean ideas which, if planted in the soil of society, will germinate and grow. We may plant it and fertilise it and water it, but God, or the nature of things if you please, must give the increase.
these ideas need not necessarily be great ideas. There is an old saying: "Nothing great as great begins." If only the idea have life in itself, its growing, if carefully watched and tended, will lead the way to other and better and bigger things.
(2) We must be capable of recognizing germinal ideas when we meet them in the road. We need on our Executive Staff more and more men who are thus capable of recognizing and evaluating germinal ideas.
Let us tell ourselves again and again what we already know, that we have no monopoly of ideas, just because we are connected with foundations. There are many, many, many men in this world of ours who are thinking, and thinking seriously, and whose thoughts are developing germinal ideas. Charged with our responsibility, we need to be ever going abroad in the world that we may find these men possessed of germinal ideas, in order that with the means at our command we may from time to time, and let us hope often and in many cases, help them to plant and fertilize and water these ideas which will surely bear fruit in human betterment.
We can never find these men with ideas, by sitting in our offices. We shall have to get out into this world of life, that we may see them and recognize them and cooperate with them. And the best way to get out into the world, and the surest way to find them, is for us to be doing something with our own ideas out in the world where we come in contact with real men and real women to whom God has given these germinal ideas and ideals. Someone has said: "The proper study of man is man." We must study man in action, society as it really is, institutions and even governments as they really are, in order that we may get hold of-those real- things which, if properly developed, will promote the wellbeing of mankind.
(3) You will pardon me if I refer to the General Education Board with which I have been connected so long. I am conscious of many of our mistakes, and I am ashamed of them. We will dismiss that. I think it was extremely
Dr. Wickliffe Rose, who was General Agent of the Peabody Fund, which had voted to discontinue its work after a few years, began to use in very limited amounts some of the Peabody money in cooperation with state departments of education, by supporting supervisors of rural schools, 4 or 5 for whites and one, in Virginia, for Negroes. When it came time to close the work of the Peabody Fund, that work of Dr. Rose was taken over by the General Education Board and extended for both races to all the southern states. Here was a germinal idea discovered by another man, which we took over. It is unnecessary to tell you how fruitful that work has been.
Soon thereafter, Mr. Gates got hold of another germinal idea, namely, that in the South where 85% of the people were in agriculture, the work of agriculture was so poorly done that the people were not making money enough to support the three great institutions of civilization: the Home, the Church, and the School. That germinal idea was passed on to the Secretary of the Board with the injunction that it was his business to learn how to deliver to the farmers the existing knowledge of the art of agriculture. Then we found Dr. Knapp and the farm demonstration work was begun, at first in a very small way, and only after some years did it include all the southern states. Out of this came the Boys' Club work and the Girls' Club work. And out of the demonstration idea came new ideas of rural education which have modified the curriculum of the country schools and, in the South at least, adapted them increasingly to the needs of rural life. The southern country school is no longer a poorly taught and poorly equipped city school located in the country, but it is a real country school. There is still much work to do to defend these schools against the encroachment of the methods of city schools and to develop the proper kind of country education, but the idea is there and its realization is full of hope.
While we were doing all this, we felt rather than knew that something else was the matter, that is, the people of the South were not as efficient as they ought to be. The Secretary of the Board was invited to join and travel with President Roosevelt's Country Life Commission. He there met Dr. Stiles and heard about the hookworm and after a while came to see that this dread enemy of good health was incapacitating perhaps 50% of the people in the South. Out of this came the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm and, best of all, it brought into our little group Dr. Wickliffe Rose. The story of how from eradicating the hookworm disease the International Health Board, which succeeded the Sanitary Commission, has inaugurated measures and institutions for the promotion of public health, is well-known to you all.
I don't need to go further with the work of the General Education Board. When we began we did not even dream of doing these things. We found a simple, small
I have preached quite long enough in this paper. I only wish I were with you to talk these things out rather than write them, but I am so strongly convinced of the truth of what Flexner said, that we must first of all get hold of germinal ideas and then follow them with keen vision and earnest purpose, that I just wanted to tell you how I feel.
I have another big idea germinating in my mind, and heart I may say, for I have had much time and opportunity for reflection since I have been here, but I must not go into this in any detail now. I want to take it up with you-all when I get back. Let me barely mention the thing -- an Institute of Science. Here we have got to find men of ideas and capacity first of all. I believe that one of the present greatest needs of the world is an Institute of Science where men in the various divisions of science -- and, after all, science is one -- may work together, live together, lunch together, commune with one another every day, and where they may bring together carefully selected fellows who, with their teachers or seniors, may work together for the advancement of science. Think it over, and when I get back I will be prepared to present the matter to you-all with some detail. Now will you be good!