Report of Missouri Farmers' Week. 89 



your prosperity, because their prosperity depends upon yours. 

 So it is not strange that they are so ready with willing advice. 



I believe your purely technical problems are in good hands. 

 Missouri has a great Agricultural College, so great that when 

 Kansas was in need of a strong man to place at the head of its 

 Agricultural College we came to Missouri and took one of your 

 big men from the place. Indeed, I plead guilty to being one 

 who participated in the theft, for I was at that time president of 

 the Board of Regents of the Kansas Commission, and I am glad 

 to say that we have never regretted the choice we made. Mis- 

 souri has every reason to be proud of its Agricultural College 

 and the work it is doing. 



But it is not of the conservation of the soil nor of the ques- 

 tion of roads nor of any one phase of technical husbandry that I 

 want to talk to you, important as they are, despite the com- 

 mendable progress we are making in increasing the yield of a 

 field and flock and herd, despite the increased price thereof, 

 measured by dollars and cents which the American farmer has 

 received for his products in recent years. Every thinking man 

 realizes that all men are with the men who till the soil. The 

 Missouri farmer and the Kansas farmer on the whole are doing 

 better perhaps than their fathers did. They are not howling 

 calamity; they are not pessimistic, but they are thinking and 

 thinking deeply on those questions which concern them and 

 their families and they know things are not altogether right. 

 We don't all agree in our definition of the trouble; we don't all 

 agree as to the remedy to be applied, but I think we all do agree 

 that there is something wrong with the present conditions and all 

 agree that they can be bettered. In the first place, we have lost 

 a good many bright men and women who should have remained 

 on the farm. For half a century our national system of taxa- 

 tion and our business system has placed a high premium upon 

 urban life and has discouraged farm life, with the inevitable 

 result that our city population has increased in the past few 

 decades far out of proportion to the increase of farm population. 

 And aside from the alluring opportunities for making money, the 

 call of the city is perhaps a wholesome craving, born as it is of 

 the desire for fellowship, for amusement and culture. But the 

 cost of gratifying this desire in the city is very great, involving 

 loss of neighborliness, curtailment of freedom, sacrifice of 

 identity. We read in the newspapers from day to day of the 

 fights and brawls in the cities, of arrests for drunkenness and of 



