Missouri Country Life Conference. 261 



people of several European lands and everywhere it was the 

 same — men, women and children working in the fields with 

 hand tools. When some of us, now at mid-age, were boys on 

 the farm a riding tool was scarcely known. Today one lad 

 with four horses will do as much as three of us used to do. The 

 machine has made the farmer a business man; he is thinking of 

 his farm in terms of profit more than, as he used to do, as a 

 permanent home; he is becoming less a working man and more 

 a capitalist. The speculative features thus brought into farm 

 operations is not altogether of salutary value. 



President Wilson says that while the farmers were feeding 

 the world Congress was feeding the trusts. A picture of the 

 President's cabinet will show the faces of men several of whom 

 were brought up on the farm, but not one of whom is now a 

 farmer. So it is with Congress and the Legislatures. Their 

 members are largely lawyers. The farmers are the largest class 

 and their interests are greater than those of banking or manu- 

 facturing, yet the lawmakers are usually much more concerned 

 with commercial and manufacturing interests than with farm 

 interests; it is because the lawyer and average representative is 

 a city man and sees commercial interests largest. Why do not 

 the farmers send more of their own number to the Legislatures? 

 Certainly they are the peers of many who go there from the cities. 

 Our public domain was given away to the speculator and the cor- 

 poration and the natural homes of the people forfeited to the 

 speculative profits of rich men because we had no home makers 

 in Congress who depended upon the land. So we practically 

 built the railroads and then turned them over to skillful com- 

 mercial manipulators who ran them for private instead of public 

 interest, and charging all the "traffic will bear" increased capi- 

 talization enormously and now asks us to allow them to continue 

 to make dividends on the inflated values, and some day will ask 

 us to pay enormous prices to redeem the very rights of way we 

 so freely gave away. In Germany the railroads are owned by 

 the people and men ride for less than one-half what they pay 

 in this country, and their freight packages are carried for the 

 most part much cheaper because the roads are run as a public 

 utility instead of as private enterprise. Here we have paid 

 tens of millions to have our parcels carried by the express com- 

 panies while in Europe the government has carried them for 

 the whole people for a fraction of what we paid. The same is 

 true of telegraph systems. "All these are public utilities and the 



