DAIRY MEETING. I49 



were called "poor rates." By these every head of a family was 

 provided with a certain minimum amount of money from the 

 town or county if he did not get it by work. Now a good many 

 people are naturally lazy, and they soon began to stop work if 

 they could get about so much money anyway ; and then an addi- 

 tion was made to the law so that the employers of labor took 

 advantage of the situation and did not pay the laborers so high 

 wages. They reasoned that if the laborer would get so much 

 anyway, from the public treasury, what use was there of paying 

 him for his work. The result was a most awful situation of 

 poverty, crime and immorality. It was evident that this law 

 would not work very well, and some man rose in Parliament and 

 said he thought it was because there was not religion enough in 

 England. They figured it out that there was not church room 

 enough for the population and appropriated a million pounds to 

 build churches. You know what the result of that was. People 

 did not flock into the churches just because they were built. The 

 building of the churches and the spending of a million pounds 

 did not do any good. Crime and poverty were still on the 

 increase. If they had spent that million pounds in educating 

 those lazy loafers to work- and get something by the sweat of 

 their brows, they would have received some benefit from what 

 they spent and would not have had a lot of empty churches, 

 which, by the way, are standing there still, hundreds of them, 

 all over England. Within half a mile of St. Paul's in London 

 there are 300 churches and the most of them have only the sexton 

 and the rector to hear the service, the rector paid by the govern- 

 ment. If they had spent that money in teaching the people, the 

 way we are teaching the people by appropriations from the State 

 for a dairy conference, farmers' institutes, etc.. they would have 

 had a prosperous set of citizens instead of a pauper class. I said 

 in the beginning that a nation is prosperous if the people are 

 prosperous, and now I will say that it is the duty of any nation 

 to put its citizens in a position to become prosperous. — not to 

 help the people but to help the people to help themselves. You 

 know how that is in private life. You can help a man to a posi- 

 tion where he can get good wages, which is better than to give 

 him an equal amount of money out of your own hard earned 

 wages. That is what our government is doing. A few years 

 ago the government made an appropriation of $15,000 a year 



