Report of Missouri Farmers' Week, 97 



and bring prosperity and happiness to our state, is the amend- 

 ment to our constitution absolutely prohibiting the traffic in 

 intoxicating liquors from one end of the state to the other. It 

 has been on trial over thirty years. It has reduced the con- 

 sumption of liquor to the very minimum and has emptied our 

 poorhouses, our prisons and asylums, made better homes, 

 happier and healthier families and brought a higher standard of 

 education and intelligence. It is endorsed by more than three- 

 fourths of our people, and is a portion of the fundamental law of 

 our state nearest and dearest to their hearts. I hope you and I 

 may live to see the day when liquor will be excluded from every 

 state in the Union. 



The black and damning social evil must be eradicated; the 

 purity of American womanhood must be maintained; the inde- 

 fensible double standard of morals must be wiped out abso- 

 lutely; the exploitation of children in factories and mills must 

 be stopped; and there must be vigorous prosecution for wife and 

 child desertion; must be pensions for indigent widowed mothers 

 and dependent orphan children; especially must our country be 

 spared of war on account of the deplorable conditions existing in 

 Mexico. Forcible intervention in Mexico would mean the 

 raising of an army of half a million American youths at a cost 

 of much more than one million dollars a day, and many lives 

 risked in a bad climate, probably have years of contention, boys 

 sent home physical wrecks and new blood forwarded to replace 

 them, draining the nation's vitality and increasing the nation's 

 burdens. Who will call for such a sacrifice? Owners of prop- 

 erty in Mexico, many of them, are mere gamblers on a long 

 chance, big interests which find in war new opportunities for 

 plunder. The real patriotic Americans stand behind their 

 President to prevent this nation from being stampeded into a 

 costly war by a selfish and conscienceless war party seeking some 

 selfish advantage. We have in Washington a President whose 

 expert knowledge of the history of the people and the nation is 

 surpassed by no other statesman; the world has no stronger 

 champion of the rights of man; his patriotism is as unquestioned 

 as Lincoln's; and his conception of the part the American nation 

 should play in the turmoil of this hemisphere is clear and far- 

 seeing and, speaking as one who does not belong to President 

 Wilson's political party, I believe such a man should be trusted 

 to do what is wise and right. What the President wants and the 



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