activities affect all classes of people, we may return to Washington, where all of the work "heads up" on the desks of some four thousand employees who make up what is commonly thought of as the Department of Agriculture.

There are in the Department twentytwo bureaus-no less bureaus because one is called "service," another "board," another "office." This is more than twice as many bureaus as any other department has. Many of them are purely agricultural in their nature-such, for instance, as the Bureaus of Animal Industry, Plant Industry, Dairying. Some are agricultural only in a secondary sense of the word-such as the Forest Service. Some serve agriculture no whit more than they serve industry and commerce -such as the Weather Bureau and the Bureau of Public Roads. Some, like the Bureau of Entomology and the Bureau of Biological Survey, have to do with insects and animals, good and bad, whose ministrations and depredations help or hurt all classes of people pretty much the same. There is one, that of Agricultural Economics, which is purely a business bureau, and, while it approaches business from the farm side, its work affects all business. There is one, the Bureau of Home Economics, which is purely a home-making bureau, functioning hardly more for the farm than for the city home.

So widely does the work of these bureaus range that between some of them there is no similarity, except this single

essential similarity-that all of them are engaged in research work along scientific lines. Among most of them there is one other similarity. They have regulatory duties. Laws, enacted by Congress, are given into their hands for enforcement. Many of them have also educational functions. In some the research feature predominates, in others the regulatory, in still others the educational. One, the Fixed Nitrogen Research Laboratory, has a single definite scientific problem to solve, and has no other duties. Others, such as the Packers and Stockyards Administration and the Grain Futures Administration, have each a single law to administer. One, the Office of Cooperative Extension Work, has as its sole duty the carrying to the public of the knowledge gained by the research bu

Yet truthful men who are in intimate touch with him vouch for the fact that Secretary Jardine does not sign, on the average, more than ten letters a day. The mail from the Department of Agriculture bulks so large as to have been for years the despair of the postal service, as to have inspired in the minds of Congressmen and others plans for revoking the franking privilege and by some means making the Department pay the postage on its letters. Almost innumerable letters touching the work of all of the twenty-two bureaus are addressed to the Secretary. In the article of this series treating of the work of the White House mention was made of the great flood of letters addressed to the President but shunted out through the various chutes to the executive departments. Perhaps a fifth of all these letters are shunted to the Secretary of Agriculture. And he writes or, at least, signs-ten letters a day.

This astounding economy of executive energy is possible because there is a double hook-up between the bureaus and the Secretary.

THE chiefs of bureaus and the direc

tors of work get the letters as they are sifted down, sift them still further down the line to their division and section chiefs, and, finally, the greater part of the four thousand workers in Washington have a part in answering the letters whose writers expected replies from the Secretary of Agriculture. Mostly

they are better written than if the Secretary had written them himself—not that the four thousand men and women are better letter writers than Mr. Jardine, but that they are specialists on almost four thousand phases of the Department's work and have devoted their lives each to his or her own specialty.

The bureau chiefs are, in a large way, the powers of the Department of Agriculture-impregnable fortresses, it has sometimes been thought. Mostly, they Mostly, they are men who have come up from the ranks through long service in the various bureaus. Dr. L. O. Howard, Chief of the Bureau of Entomology, has been in that Bureau for forty-seven years. Dr. E. W. Nelson, Chief of the Bureau of Biological Survey, has been with that Bureau for thirty-six years, and for fortyeight years he has been in the same line of work. Other chiefs have not served quite so long, but, with possibly two exceptions, they have been for long periods in the Department. Most of them have personally trained their key men. A chief is a Civil Service employee, not ordinarily subject to removal. When a man attains to a chiefship, he ordinarily settles into it for life, because it is the work to which he had long before dedicated his life. He lays out a program that will require a lifetime to carry out, proceeds to carry it out, and is not much swerved from it by Secretaries or Congresses or even Presidents. Congress has sometimes threatened to interrupt their programs by cutting off their appropriations, but no such threat has ever been carried out. The chiefs are big chiefs; but they are not always invincible chiefs, as Secretary Jardine proved when he sent Dr. H. C. Taylor packing from the Bureau of Agricultural Economics.

That is an unpleasant duty now well behind the Secretary of Agriculture. With the twenty-two chiefs now on the jobs he works in the closest sort of cooperation. Secretary Jardine realizesas not all Secretaries have realized-that no one man can be a specialist in all branches of human knowledge, or even of agricultural knowledge. He could himself qualify as a specialist in agronomy and, to a lesser degree, in economics. But he leaves the specialties to the specialists who have grown up with them in the Department.

a set of men who might be called specialists on specialties. There are five of them the Director of Scientific Work, the Director of Regulatory Work, the Director of Extension Work, the Director of Information, and the Director of Personnel and Business Administration. They rank in departmental organization next to the Assistant Secretary, and in actual significance of work performed are decidedly more important. The position of Assistant Secretary of Agriculture has frequently been, more than any other in frequently been, more than any other in the Government, similar to that of VicePresident. Only occasionally, when a man of exceptional personality held the position, has it performed a distinctive service.

The directors of work are the real administrators between the Secretary and

way somewhat wrong. Those who do not believe in those things say it is a way eminently practical.

Secretary Jardine has been since he came into the position energetically trying to put himself in touch with the key problems, and the key men in agriculture

and in other lines of work that may aid agriculture-and then to attack specific problems in a definite way. He is in endless, and almost ceaseless, conference with the specialists in his own Department. But he is in almost ceaseless consultation, too, with every-day people. His effort is, not to work out a solution himself, and then try to make people accept it, but to work out with the people concerned a plan that will meet their needs and be acceptable to them.

That, at

HEN Mr. Houston was Secretary

of Agriculture, the real beginning was made toward the development of that now elaborate machinery for assisting the farmers to market their products to the best advantage. Mr. Houston called it "the other half of agriculture." Up to that time practically the whole effort had been along the line of assisting the farmer to raise bigger animals and get larger yields from his fields. At about the time that emphasis began to be placed on "the other half of agriculture" somebody in the Department-I have always egotistically believed that it was I said that making two blades of grass to grow where one grew before is a fine sentiment but mighty poor agriculture, unless there is a market for the second blade.

That matter of finding the market for the second blade or, failing that, of preventing the growing of the second blade is to-day the bigger part of the job of the Secretary of Agriculture. Mr. Jardine has approached it in a way somewhat new. Those who believe in Government price fixing, Government regulation of production, Government-controlled export corporations, and the like say it is a

ERE is an example of the way Jardine works.

When the frost had just begun to lie on the pumpkin and the fodder was not wholly in the shock, it became a matter of common knowledge that the corn growers of Iowa were ruined by prosperity. While the crop in many sections of the country was hard hit by drought, nature had showered a bountiful crop on Iowa. There was not too much corn, but too large a proportion of it was in Iowa. The price slumped. Unless the farmers could get money to tide them over while they held their corn for orderly marketing, they were ruined. And the banks of Iowa were not able to advance the money, though they, along with the farmers, faced ruin if the corn was dumped on the market.

Secretary Jardine sent a man from his own Department and one from the Federal Reserve Board out to Iowa to investigate. They came back to Washington and reported the situation as they found it as it is briefly outlined in the preceding paragraph. The Secretary consulted with his specialists. He had a miniature conference with officials of the Treasury and of the Federal Reserve Board. Then he called a conference, to be held in Chicago, of farmers, bankers, Federal officials, and others interested. Two credit associations were organized, under the provisions of the Intermediate Credit Act, financed by money from outside of Iowa, for assisting the corn growers of Iowa to hold their corn until the market should be ready to take it in an orderly manner.

Within ten days after the return of the two investigators from Iowa the credit associations were in operation.

There is plenty of work for a Secretary of Agriculture to do even when he signs only ten letters a day.

W

HILE I was in Yellowstone Park at the latter end of July, 1925, I halted at Camp Roosevelt long enough to write the series of articles upon the international conference at Honolulu which have already appeared in The Outlook. The place is named Camp Roosevelt because near by John Burroughs and Theodore Roosevelt made their camp in the month of April, 1903. It is a location of great interest and charm, with a wide view of the Yellowstone hills and sky.

The

spirit of the dynamic President still abides about the camp. The wrangler, the rangers, the managers, and many of the guests are the sort of persons who like the way Roosevelt did things. They are his kind. The first night I was there the whole crowd gathered around the fireplace and insisted upon hearing all I had to say about his life and qualities. I think they squeezed everybody dry on this theme who ever knew him at all.

The camp is made up of a long central room, with a big fireplace at each

end, where the guests foregather socially and take their meals; and each guest has his own tent or log cabin outside, in lines radiating from the main building. Down where I slept, at the end of the line, it was so quiet after night fell that I know now what Whittier meant by "the silence of eternity." I think nothing snores or peeps or barks or cries up in that country after dark. While I was at the camp I heard that Jimmie McBride, the guide of John Burroughs and President Roosevelt in 1903, was still living the life of a

ranger recluse about fifteen or twenty miles up in the hills, and was an interesting character in himself and devoted to the memory of his friend Teddy. So I asked the superintendent of the Park to have him come down. He met us by arrangement one morning on one of the trout streams half-way, and I let the others fish while I talked with Jimmie. He hadn't been down out of the hills for two months. He lives alone, and likes it. He is now in the sixties- -a shrewd blueeyed Irishman with high-pitched voice, still clear-visioned and sturdy. He was once an Indian fighter on the plains.

W

HEN Roosevelt and Burroughs came to the Park in 1903, McBride was the Chief Ranger. Roosevelt had seen him once the year before. The President came in on the first train that ever ran into Gardner, and not only mounted cavalrymen, majors, and other officers, and scouts, but the Governor of Montana Roosevelt's old friend Carter, afterwards United States Senator and a considerable part of the population of the State were present. Governor Carter is the man of whom Roosevelt used to tell the fetching story of campaigning in Montana, and how, after a political meeting, he and Carter were walking along a narrow wooden sidewalk in the town when a great burly Swede suddenly lurched out of a saloon and began coming down the wooden walk towards them, covering both sides of it. Carter happened to be an Irishman, and Roosevelt, of course, was a Dutchman; and this burly Swede as he rolled along the walk towards them, eventually crowding them off entirely, was singing at the top of his lungs:

Oh, the Irish and the Dutch,
They don't amount to much,

But hoo-raw for the Scandinoo-vi-oo! Ever thereafter when Roosevelt and Carter met, even in the executive chamber at Washington, they were accustomed to join hands and dance around the room singing this ditty at the top of their voices.

T

'HE day when the Roosevelt party

came into Gardner there was such a crush around the train that nobody could. get out of it, and the army officer in control, rather than have the military interfere, called to McBride, who was in the crowd and knew the kind of people he had to deal with, to come up on the platform and try his hand at holding the crowd back. Roosevelt recognized him at once from their acquaintance of the year before, and, with a grin, said: "Hello, Mac! You can get them to

velt lived on his ranch. Roosevelt wanted to see him. It took two or three days to get Jones sobered up and fit for the prospect, but he finally turned up. and immediately started the conversation.

"Well, Teddy, you have got a blank of a good job since I saw you last," and, pulling a flask out of his pocket, he offered the President a drink.

is."

"I want to see them," said Roosevelt. "Let's go up there by ourselves." And off they rode immediately, and McBride told me that Roosevelt sat down in the

midst of the sheep and studied them for an hour and a quarter.

There were two characters among the Government scouts who began to look green-eyed at McBride. One of them was the "Duke of Hell-Roaring," as he had been named locally, a foreigner with some political pull, who was, I believe, chief of the scouts. Another was "Buffalo Jones." The next morning, when they were starting out for the day, with a considerable crowd around, Roosevelt spied McBride, and called to him:

"Mac, aren't you going along to-day?" And Mac replied, "I don't know, Mr. President. I haven't any orders."

Roosevelt turned to the army officer and said: "I think I would like to have McBride go along. He seems to know a lot about this country."

All of which was evidently gall and wormwood to the "Duke of Hell-Roaring" and "Buffalo Jones," the latter of whom unwisely threatened McBride with the loss of his job in a tone so loud that Roosevelt caught it. Later, when Roosevelt got an opportunity to do so quietly, he said to McBride, “I see you're in trouble, Mac, already." The President took his time to help in the revenge. "Buffalo Jones" had arranged a mountain-lion party for the President, which turned out unsuccessfully. During the hunt Jones's hounds had been lost in the mountains, and the next morning Roosevelt said to McBride in Jones's hearing: "Mac, I think you had better take a day off and go out and help Jones find his hounds. They couldn't find any lions yesterday, and now Jones can't find the dogs!"

Another Jones, named Bill, was then living in the Park, a man who had been sheriff in South Dakota in the 'eighties of the nineteenth century, when Roose

Bill laughed. "Oh, it tastes pretty good, just the same, as it passes down my throat. Say, Teddy," said he, "do you remember when the buckskin pony threw you over the corral fence?"

"Sh-h-h!" said the President. "Bill, you mustn't give me away like that!"

T1

'HE driver of the sled on which the President was touring some of the roads in this month of April died suddenly during the night. At breakfast the army major was quite wrought up about it, and said to McBride: "Now we mustn't tell the President. It would upset him and spoil his trip."

"Well, Major, I think there'll be hell to pay if we don't tell him and he finds it out," said McBride.

There was a door swinging into another room in which the President was eating his breakfast, and he caught a bit of the conversation.

"What's the trouble, Mac?" he called. Mac told him, and the President got up immediately from the table. "That's tough," said he. "The most we can do is to pay our respects to him." And he walked half a mile in snow up to his hips to the house. Then he took Mac aside and said: "Mac, go with the body to Gardner, and find out about his relatives and where the body is to be shipped; and, whatever the cost of it is, send the bill to me, and don't say anything to anybody about it."

Up in the canyon Mac and the President put on skis together. The President said, "I can beat you in a race!" and they started down the incline. At the first jump the weight of the President smashed his pair of skis to pieces. This led Roosevelt to ask how many pairs of skis they had up there in the winter for the rangers and the scouts. Looking into the matter, they found they had very few, not enough to go around. "Well, I'll see how much influence I have with this Administration," said the President. And every fall thereafter, as long as he