TWENTIETH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 613 



number of impromptu speeches, and in following that custom 

 we have always enjoyed them immensely. This year, however, 

 we thought a variation of this program would be agreeable and 

 pleasant to all of you, and in casting about as to whom we might 

 ask, whom we might want to honor, and whom we felt sure 

 would bring a message to us, we thought of Mr. J. B. Weaver, 

 of Des Moines, a man who is carrying on the noble traditions 

 through the second generation, who is devoting himself to serv- 

 ice, and who has rendered to the farmers of this state a far 

 greater service than even they know at this time. I don't know^ 

 of a man in the whole city, or the whole state, indeed, w^hom it 

 would give me greater pleasure to introduce to you at a gather- 

 ing of this kind than J. B. Weaver, Jr. Mr. Weaver! (Ap- 

 plause.) 



ADDRESS OF J. B. WEAVER, JR., OF DES MOINES, IOWA. 



Mr. Toastmaster, ladies and members of the association: The toast- 

 master has said that usually you are permitted to make the speeches 

 at the banquet, and now he has the nerve to give me an audience of gen- 

 tlemen who want to speak themselves. (Laughter.) That is about as 

 difficult a position for a speaker as one might imagine. Nevertheless, 

 I am glad to be here to look into your faces; you men, and women, too, 

 because I know the women have been interested right along with you in 

 this great organization that has meant so much in the development and 

 in the life of the state, particularly as relates to agriculture. I look 

 upon you as one of the manifestations of that complex development of 

 this great state that in seventy-five years has marched practically in that 

 time from the raw prairie, trodden only by the foot of the savage, be- 

 cause it was seventy-five years only since they established the fort down 

 here at the Raccoon forks — marched from that primitive condition to the 

 great state that it is today, the lowest in illiteracy, the richest in per 

 capita wealth, the most fertile in this hemisphere, if not the world, the 

 freest, the safest place in which to live, the most comfortable, taking 

 them on the average, the highest type of American citizenship — that's 

 Iowa! And I am glad to face you gentlemen who have endeavored (ap- 

 plause) and done your share in making that possible. 



I am a lawyer — if you will pardon me for admitting it to you — sup- 

 posed to be a dangerous thing to admit; when I went over to the legis- 

 lature in the Thirty-seventh general assembly, there was some prejudice 

 against the lawyers — there always is, you know. But that didn't make 

 any difference to me, for I felt that any man that is born in Iowa, lived 

 all his life in Iowa, and has seen all that I have seen since the civil war 

 in the development of this state, who doesn't know in his brain, and 

 doesn't feel in his heart that the agricultural interests of this state are 

 not only the great dominant interests economically, but that they carry 

 the entire future happiness and success, all of the wondrous future that 



