562 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 



cases are being advocated by the supreme court, so that we should know 

 within a short time whether those laws will stand as constitutional. 



I mention those things to justify the statement I made that congress 

 during the past nine months has made a very unusual record as far as 

 undertaking to serve agriculture is concerned. None of those laws passed 

 is intended to give the farmer an unfair advantage over other classes of 

 citizens, but all of them were passed with the recognition of the great 

 outstanding fact that prosperity and the very life of the United States de- 

 pends upon the agricultural industi-y, and if our agriculture doesn't pros- 

 per the nation cannot prosper. They were all largely addressed to the 

 Immediate emergency, and if congress has not passed more legislation 

 which some have advocated, it has been because the justification for that 

 legislation could not be made. In times like this you always have a lot 

 of freak legislation suggested. In these periods of stress there are people 

 coming forward with remedies which experience shows are not successful, 

 which are likely to make conditions worse than they are at the present 

 time. 



There is another thing that congress has done which to me is full of 

 promise so far as agriculture is concerned, and that is they have appointed 

 a committee of ten members, five from the senate and five from the house, 

 and that committee has been sitting for about five months just inquiring 

 into agricultural conditions. They have given everybody who wants the 

 opportunity to appear and talk about agricultural conditions, an opportu- 

 nity to be heard. They have employed a number of competent statisticians 

 and economists, they have drawn upon our department for a great mass 

 of statistical material, they have reached out in every direction that any 

 of the members could think of, or that anyone could suggest to them, for 

 information that would throw light on our agricultural difficulties and 

 would indicate some practical remedies. That commission has not yet 

 made its report — I think its first report will be made by the first of Jan- 

 uary, and I am very hopeful of the suggestions which will grow out of that 

 report — it is a thoroughly constructive piece of business, gone into with- 

 out prejudice simply for the purpose of inquiring into and getting real 

 facts as to our agricultural situation. 



Now I want to say a word to you about the Department of Agriculture. 

 We employ over 18,000 people in all. The work is divided into foru gen- 

 eral lines: First, what we call the scientific research — all of the experi- 

 mental work, the gathering or search for improved plants and aninials, 

 methods of breeding and everything of that sort. Second, the extension 

 work in which the effort is to take what we have learned from this scien- 

 tific research into the country, to bring it into the farm home, to put it 

 within the reach of every man that wants to profit by it, and that, of 

 course, is not only direct, but In co-operation with the various agricultural 

 colleges and experiment stations and through the county-agent movement. 

 Then, third, we have what we call the service work, of which the crop 

 estimates and marketing work is an example, and then we have the regu- 

 latory work. We administer some thirty or more regulatory laws — meat 

 inspection, the food and drugs act, the mdgratory bird act — in all over 

 thirty of those regulatory laws. And then in addition to that regulatory 



