572 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 



this deflation process which is occurring and which must go much fur- 

 ther before we can be again upon a normal basis, and before agriculture 

 and other industries ^s well can enjoy their real share of a national pros- 

 perity. As President Harding has so well said, it is a travesty that in 

 this country, with its warehouses literally bursting with food, with the 

 mines filled with minerals, with great wealth here, that we should have 

 this great army of unemployed and this year of depression — it is a chal- 

 lenge to the intelligence of the nation. I don't know how best that chal- 

 lenge can be met. By laws? Yes. By regulation? Yes. But best of 

 all by sane public opinion; and I believe that bodies like this are deveop- 

 ing such public opinion, and that their efforts along these lines are bound 

 to help greatly in this important cause. (Applause.) 



ADDRESS OF HARVEY INGHAM, 



Editor Des Moines Register. 



Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: It would be a very bold man, 

 as Doctor Pearson suggested, who would come before a body of this kind 

 to make an address on short notice or no notice at all, for that matter. 

 We have been here for some time now, and I am going to keep you only 

 a few minutes. 



I think I was present, if not at the very first banquet of this associa- 

 tion, at least at an early one, and I remember that at that time I qualified 

 as a poultry raiser — my wife had carefully preserved a dozen eggs for 

 setting and, after proper care and attention, the old hen hatched one 

 chicken. (Laughter.) I asked her what she did with the eggs, and she 

 replied that she knew they were perfectly fresh eggs, because she kept 

 them in the refrigerator all the time. (Laughter.) 



And I can come before you this evening as a cattle feeder, for a num- 

 ber of years ago my brother-in-law and myself had some land in northern 

 Iowa, and we decided to buy cattle in the spring, put them on pasture 

 during the season and sell them in the fall. That year our pasture ran 

 short, our cattle couldn't get enough to eat, and they actually lost weight 

 from the time we bought them, and when fall came we couldn't sell them 

 for love or money. We had several thousand bushels of corn on hand 

 that was worth $1.50 a bushel, and we thought that we could carry them 

 over the winter, put some weight on them with that corn, and sell them 

 at a profit, but when spring came we sold them for less than we had paid 

 for them. (Laughter.) During the three years we continued our efforts 

 as cattle experimenters, we succeeded in losing two corn crops, as well 

 as our pastures, and we decided that there was a Jonah about it some- 

 where, and we withdrew from the business; and ever since that experi- 

 ence I have felt a sympathy for the men who are feeding cattle, because 

 I know what it is to feed cattle on a losing market. 



Whenever I come up to a proposition that is before the farmers of Iowa 

 and the west, affecting them as a class; whenever I find a class of work- 

 ers that finds itself as a class in straits, I always feel that a proper solu- 

 tion of the difficulty requires that I look into the history of the occppa- 

 tion to find out why it is that disaster hits one class of people harder 

 than it does another, and I think it would be well if the farmers generally 



