246 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE OflE. Doc. 



older I get, the more delighted I am to come and mingle with my 

 fellow-men. God help the man who knows it all, and lives by him- 

 self; he is to be pitied. And when a man labors and makes some 

 money, instead of laying it up to ruin some boy or some girl, he 

 should get something out of life and become broader and greater 

 and a better citizen for his community and the state in which he 

 lives. Not long ago, my friend Hubbard, who went down on the 

 Lusitania, was lecturing to the bankers of Pennsylvania at Bed- 

 ford Springs, and said : "Gentlemen, not long ago I visited an insane 

 asylum where the people were crazy. I noticed that a single keeper 

 had a dozen men out walking and giving them exercise, and I went 

 to" that keeper and I said to him 'Do you realize the danger that 

 you are in? Suppose these twelve men should get together, they'd 

 hammer the life out of you and run off.' 'Why,' he said, 'you don't 

 know the danger you are in from these twelve men if they would 

 get together: 'Yes,' the keeper said, 'but they can't get together.' 

 God help the people who can't get together. A friend of mine was 

 going from one town to another down south and he and his friend 

 were being hauled in a spring wagon with a mule, and a colored 

 man was doing the driving. He noticed in going along that the old 

 colored man would take his whip and pick a bee off of a leaf, would 

 pick a worm off of a stalk or stem; he was an expert with his whip, 

 and after while he came along to a hornet's nest hanging on a limb 

 and they said, "See, if you can bring that down with a crack of your 

 whip," and the nigger said, "No sir. Boss, dey'se organized." 



Now that's what it is to be organized, and nobody has watched 

 this more closely than I have within the last twenty years, and 

 right now I notice in this program that the first topic on this ques- 

 tion this afternoon is "Community Breeding" — is that correct or 

 "Community Building?" Well, you could get that community build- 

 ing, and right now, from one end to the other of this great and 

 glorious country of ours, at the Chautauquas, at public meetings of 

 this kind, men are breaking their necks to write an essay or a speech 

 and commit it to memory, starting out to build communities, and I 

 want to tell you, my dear friends, the man who takes the platform 

 to talk the building of a community, I want him to begin using the 

 personal pronoun "I" and stick to it until he is through. There is 

 no place under God's Heaven where a man should begin community 

 building more than right in his own neighborhood, that is the place 

 to begin; let him begin at home. I tell you I am from Missouri, I 

 want you to show me. I want to look at it, and I know they will 

 tell you — they can't tell you, you can't do it. The business men 

 of Pittsburgh, backed up by the Chamber of Commerce, 122 men, 

 visited twenty some towns last week. This evening one week ago, 

 in Altoona, I was invited up to talk at their reception, and in that 

 speech I happened to say, speaking to them of what they were 

 doing, I said I was the first man in Pennsylvania to raise alfalfa 

 that I know of and there wasn't anything that I said to the business 

 men of Pittsburgh that they applauded like they did when I stood 

 up before them and boasted of being the first man to raise alfalfa in 

 Pennsylvania. I say this to show how broad those men are in Pitts- 

 burgh. I know the church members at Birmingham, Pa., stood at the 

 Birmingham Church and said, "You can't do it," when I talked about 

 raising alfalfa some years ago. They said, "You can't do it." The 



