And here I am, my hands dyed red in Murderers’ Row, in the State Prison of Folsom, awaiting the day decreed by the machinery of state when the servants of the state will lead me away into what they fondly believe is the dark—the dark they fear; the dark that gives them fearsome and superstitious fancies; the dark that drives them, drivelling and yammering, to the altars of their fear-created, anthropomorphic gods.

No; I shall never be Dean of any college of agriculture.  And yet I knew agriculture.  It was my profession.  I was born to it, reared to it, trained to it; and I was a master of it.  It was my genius.  I can pick the high-percentage butter-fat cow with my eye and let the Babcock Tester prove the wisdom of my eye.  I can look, not at land, but at landscape, and pronounce the virtues and the shortcomings of the soil.  Litmus paper is not necessary when I determine a soil to be acid or alkali.  I repeat, farm-husbandry, in its highest scientific terms, was my genius, and is my genius.  And yet the state, which includes all the citizens of the state, believes that it can blot out this wisdom of mine in the final dark by means of a rope about my neck and the abruptive jerk of gravitation—this wisdom of mine that was incubated through the millenniums, and that was well-hatched ere the farmed fields of Troy were ever pastured by the flocks of nomad shepherds!

Corn?  Who else knows corn?  There is my demonstration at Wistar, whereby I increased the annual corn-yield of every county in Iowa by half a million dollars.  This is history.  Many a farmer, riding in his motor-car to-day, knows who made possible that motor-car.  Many a sweet-bosomed girl and bright-browed boy, poring over high-school text-books, little dreams that I made that higher education possible by my corn demonstration at Wistar.