Missouri Country Life Conference. 155 



which she was teaching, there would not be any trouble about 

 the ministers getting their salary and having a good congrega- 

 tion. The minister, like the teacher, like every one else now- 

 adays who wants to carry home any message, must speak in the 

 terms of the life of the people to whom he is speaking. The 

 minister 4n his work can connect up and relate the cultivation of 

 the soil and the soul, and show the analogy between better 

 seeds and better deeds, and all that sort of thing. 



Now, as I came along down here today I noticed the coun- 

 try in Missouri is much the same as it is in Illinois in respect to 

 bad roads. The time has come when the country that is not 

 worth a good road is not worth living in. You know I speak 

 the truth. That is one of the things that makes school attend- 

 ance poor, and statistics have been gathered in this country 

 showing that where in the case of eight states, all more or less 

 on the same basis in other respects except that four of them 

 have good roads and four of them have such roads as you have 

 on the average here in Missouri and we have in Illinois, and 

 showing that it made a difference in school attendance of about 

 twenty-seven per cent whether the state had good roads or bad 

 roads; and that means a twenty-seven per cent effect on the 

 literacy of the state. There is no question about that. A good 

 deal of the talk about roads has been on the dollar-and-cent 

 basis, and that is the basis that I want to get away from all the 

 while, because when the bankers began talking about a better 

 agriculture some people of course would say, "He has some 

 selfish motive." Bankers are talking about these things because 

 they want more money in the bank, but that is only a small part 

 of the story. The bankers are in this movement in a broad- 

 gauge way. Thirty-six of the Bankers' State Associations have 

 committees on agriculture, and the great American Bankers' 

 Association recognizes and supports that movement and has 

 appointed an Agricultural Commission and given us full scope, 

 and we are committing the bankers to a lot of things which they 

 stand for in splendid shape, and I want you to know that the 

 bankers are vitally interested in this matter. Bankers are 

 just like the farmers, just as many selfish bankers as there are 

 selfish farmers, for human nature runs through all of us alike. 



But getting back to the road proposition, the point I had in 

 mind was this: A good deal of our road talk to the farmers was 

 on the basis it cost the farmer so much more to haul grain over 

 poor roads, but that did not appeal to the farmers because a 



