Report of Missouri Farmers' Week. 95 



human race is developing wonderfully in charity and unselfish- 

 ness. The percentage of those who are mere beasts of burden 

 decreases. Our everyday acts, our institutions, our laws, our 

 practices, more and more are coming to be directed more truly 

 and unerringly to the ends of justice, equality and real liberty. 

 I am firm in my conviction that never before have the con- 

 sciences of men and women been so widely awakened or so 

 keenly active. I know that the world today scouts at many 

 things which we accepted a few generations ago as a matter of 

 truth. In business, in politics — in fact, in every department of 

 human life and activity — we are establishing new standards and 

 higher ideals. But there is still so much to do. 



Privilege and privileged classes, the public plunderers, 

 political corruptionists and grafters without regard to party, 

 must be eliminated; we must work for a clean, efficient govern- 

 ment as against selfish partisanship. The cost of government 

 in the State of Kansas, in the State of Missouri, and the country 

 over almost doubled the last ten years. Not only are we living 

 beyond our means, but living beyond our means to the third or. 

 fourth generation to come. This all has to be paid some time, if 

 not in direct taxes then indirectly, and the end is not yet. The 

 whole American Republic seems wild with spending. We are 

 living high, in the family, in the town and as a state and as a 

 nation. If the public money supply was as inexhaustible as air, 

 as so many agitators try to make it appear in urging appropria- 

 tions, the result would not be so serious, but we must forcibly 

 keep in mind that the government of the nation, state and lo- 

 cally has nothing to give except what it collects by taxation, 

 and this burden lies heaviest on the man at the end of the line. 

 As a part of the readjustment or liquidation which the entire 

 business world is now passing through, lower the cost of living 

 and teach us the lesson of thrift and economy in public and 

 personal affairs. It will be to the great and lasting advantage 

 of the country as a whole. The government must stop spending 

 money recklessly and wastefuUy; expenditures for battle ships, 

 rivers and harbors, monuments, public buildings — in these and 

 almost everything else there has been a shameful extravagance. 

 Congressmen actually have urged, in many instances, million- 

 dollar appropriations just because the graft was to be spent in 

 their own states; have boasted of their raids upon the public 

 treasury, and the whole thing is ruinous, a disgrace and a be- 

 trayal of the public welfare. The extreme has been reached 



