258 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



enemy. And yet how frequently we have seen it in communities 

 where just the opposite methods were adopted and people would get 

 their heads to the outside and their heels together and proceed to 

 kick the stufifing out of each other. Iowa is beginning to get away 

 from that kind of method — it doesn't pay. A magnificent example 

 of the power and effectiveness of co-operation may be seen in the 

 fighting of the great world war. We saw there a nation that tried 

 to play a lone hand and we saw what happened to it. We know 

 today what would have happened to many another nation if they 

 had attempted to adopt the same policy and play the lone hand. The 

 United States for two years, being at heart a peace-loving people, 

 was trying to keep out of the conflict because they didn't care for 

 war. The United States would gladly have followed their traditional 

 policy of isolation ; they would have been more than willing to have 

 kept out of that conflict if they had found any alternative, but the 

 alternative couldn't be found. For two years this nation saw the 

 sparks of the European conflagration flaming in our own skies. For 

 two years we heard the echoes of that struggle knocking at our very 

 doors ; time and again the angry waves of war threatened to destroy 

 our peace and security and yet for two years this nation hoped 

 against hope that armed conflict might be avoided. And then this 

 nation found that it was our war and had been our war from the 

 beginning. They began to realize, as they didn't realize before, that 

 if we didn't stand by the nations that stood most nearly for the 

 things that we stood for, that sometime we would have a powerful 

 enemy to fight, but we would have to fight that enemy alone. At 

 the time this nation began co-operating with the other nations to 

 eliminate Germany as a factor in world politics, the world was in 

 a sorry state of affairs. At that moment, Germany was standing 

 with her bloody boots upon the lacerated breast of Belgium, Serbia, 

 Roumania and Poland. At that moment, Germany was standing 

 with her foul fingers clutching at the bloody throat of prostrate 

 Russia. Germany at that moment with bloodshot eyes was ready 

 to lurch forth once more for the loot and the rape of France. That 

 was the situation when America stepped in. 



You sometimes hear the question asked as to who won the war. 

 We may just as well ask the question, which of four quarts makes 

 a gallon. The truth is that the war wasn't won, and possibly couldn't 

 have been won, without co-operation. Had it not been that every 

 nation to a greater or less extent swallowed its pride arid on the 

 26th day of February, 1918, agreed to go in and fight under a unified 



