198 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 



can do it best. We have been changing and we have been shifting, we 

 have been moving things, and it has been a gradual evolution that has 

 come to us with a broader view point and by reason of the fact we can see 

 a little farther than we did some years ago. But years ago when a man 

 said that the world was round he was burned at the stake. When one man 

 invented a telescope and bored into the heavens he was driven from his 

 friends among strangers. And out of that has grown a faith in mankind 

 that has knitted us closer together, and out of that period of doubt has 

 come a period of action when we have learned to respect each other and 

 work a little harder, and the time will come Avhen we shall have learned 

 that other lesson of working in harmony, that real lesson of co-operation. 



It has been said that a man who owes money can, if he lies awake at 

 night, hear the interest grow, but if he is free of obligations and of debt 

 and if he happens to wake up in the middle of the night he can hear the 

 grain and the grass grow. We have been worried about that situation here, 

 we have been thinking about it. I imagine there are not a half dozen or 

 dozen perhaps fairs in this state that through all of their work throughout 

 the year, their race seasons and others that show a profit; perhaps I am 

 wrong on that guess, but so many have told me that I felt I was not in 

 error in that statement. But you are no different than anyone else. Every- 

 one has taken his bumps. Everyone felt sad. But the ray of sunshine is 

 coming back, and I think you men might be interested in just one little 

 item. It was mentioned by the toastmaster that the institution I represent 

 has been engaged insofar as it is possible in trying to do something to help 

 the basic industry of this nation. We cannot do much it is true. It is an 

 economic problem. 



Someone a few months ago said there is an opening for a market in our 

 sister republic to the south here. They got together a few business men, 

 put up some money and shipped down there several carloads of fancy live- 

 stock, as good as they could find in this state, and we put it on exhibition 

 at their National Commercial Agricultural Exposition held in the nature 

 of a centennial birthday in celebration of the one hundredth anniversary, 

 of the Republic, and they looked and they saw and they wondered that 

 Iowa, then almost unknown to them could produce the things that they 

 needed so badly. They not only looked but they began to buy and in the 

 past two, or three months a little coterie of business men have been able 

 to sell at a price fair to the farmers of this state upwards of $200,000 worth 

 of live stock in Old Mexico. Their agent of agriculture and chief of their 

 bureau of animal husbandry have been with us seeing stock and fine ani- 

 mals for their sixteen agricultural schools. And if sometime in the near 

 future we can build ourselves up an institution financially strong enough 

 we believe we can sell at least fifty per cent of what these Mexicans need 

 and they have told us there is a market there for a million dollars worth 

 of stuff a month if we will get busy on it. And that means co-operation 

 and you men have unconsciously played a part in that because the stuff 

 they bought, generally speaking, was taken from your own catalogues so 

 far as its listing was concerned, for you furnished the people who wanted 

 to go out and buy it with the names of the exhibitors whom we thought 

 were the proper people to approach for buying purposes. 



