TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 151 



should be good-will work, to cultivate friendly relations between the 

 agricultural and commercial interests of the city, and so I began to in- 

 quire what directions we could go to be helpful to agriculture, and what 

 directions can we go in the city that will bring a knowledge of agriculture 

 to the city men who really need as much coaching as any farmers can In 

 reference to the interests of the city, and among the other things we be- 

 lieved that we could encourage the promotion of county fairs, and so I 

 wrote a few little promotion letters out to our friends in the western 

 part of Iowa. I was too afraid of you to go all over the state; so I went 

 all over Nebraska and over part of Iowa, passing on some good sugges- 

 tions that came to me for the promotion of fairs, and in doing that I 

 came to think more seriously about fairs than I had ever done — not be- 

 cause I had not been mixed up with them always, but we get mixed up 

 with the work we are doing in such a way that we undervalue what we 

 are doing, and I confess when I acted as president of a district fair in 

 Hall county, Nebraska, and in other places where I have held official 

 positions in fairs, I have asked myself many times whether it was worth 

 while. I have written a good deal about fairs. When I was editor of an 

 agricultural newspaper, the Nebraska Farmer, I used to write little 

 editorial articles calling attention to the educational value of county fairs 

 and of all fairs. And yet I didn't realize, as I do now, the value of the 

 fair. And so I wanted to speak to you today about the value and im- 

 portance of the work you are doing, and incidentally to suggest some of 

 the things that I think might be done far more generally and far more 

 effectively than they are now done. And this county fair proposition, I 

 want to give you just this angle of it: Take our school system, and you 

 take the high school — where would the high school get if the primary 

 grades were all wiped out? How long would the high schools last if the 

 primary grades were wiped out? Why, just one set of boys and girls 

 would get through the high school, and then you would be done. Now, that 

 is exactly the relations that the county fairs sustain to your state fairs, 

 in which we all take so much pride. I know when we get home from 

 the International at Chicago, we feel sort of sorry for a state fair, we are 

 in an apologetic mood; likewise when we come back to our county fairs 

 after being at the state fair, we are sort of sorry we are in the fair busi- 

 ness, and that our county fair is only a county fair, and it is apparently 

 so small, and there is so much of our livestock that comes in that just 

 isn't classy and doesn't look good, and so on, but we must remember that 

 it is the primary grade in the system of developing this whole agriculture 

 and livestock industry into the high ranks we have got it now. And so 

 this primary work is really the vital thing in the whole case, and if at 

 any time you feel discouraged about the work of your fair, and it comes 

 along one of those drizzly, wet weeks that sometimes hit you, and the 

 people forget to come, and you stand around there shivering just a little, 

 and you know the gate receipts won't pay out, and all that sort of thing 

 that we all know something about, keep it everlastingly in mind that you 

 are doing your best, that the very basis of the livestock and agricultural 

 product business is the fair, and that it is through your work that we 

 build up all of these other things. 



