TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 153 



the business that is provided for them to do by law, is to take hold of 

 rural recreations and amusements. Now, in Nebraska around our large 

 towns we farmed out rural amusements to men who are so low down in 

 the scale of animal existance that they used and owned regulated dance 

 halls and the beer saloon to furnish local amusements. Thank God, that 

 day has gone forever! The beer saloon is banished even from Nebraska, 

 and I will say to you people that I absolutely would not live in such a com- 

 munity that would deal in alcohol in any form except in the arts. But 

 that is neither here nor there. 



I tell you that from my right of experience in agriculture, not as a big 

 farmer for the best years of my life, but as a life-long student and teacher 

 of agricultural affairs, that the one draw-back to agricultural life is the 

 lack of recreation and amusement. Now, we may think that is not so, 

 but you just get a picture of the farm life, six days in the week with no 

 companionship except his own wife and children and the team that he 

 drives and the dog that licks his boots. That is not natural. Man is a 

 gregarious animal, and society is the dearest thing furnished to him — 

 human companionship. God made man the only animal than can laugh. 

 A joke springs naturally from the human h^art, and the smile and laughter 

 of children, and the companionship of wife and neighbors, those are the 

 things that are worth while in life. We complain about the boys leaving 

 the farm, and the girls leaving the farm, and men leaving the farm, and 

 families moving into town, and there is an absolute fear — there is an abso- 

 lute fear in the hearts of thousands that the farms will be abandoned and 

 the food supply will be scarce because the farm will not be tilled. And 

 they tell us it is the bright lights that attract them into the city. It is 

 human companionship that is absolutely dominant in the human heart, 

 that is what attracts men into the towns. And I have got to say that we 

 have got to regard farming as not a business, although we are making a 

 horrible clamor in Nebraska, too, about the protection of a business, about 

 the cost of production plus. But farm life is not a business, it is a manner 

 of life, and unless a man loves the farm life, loves the outdoors, loves the 

 trees, loves animals, loves all of the liberty and beauty and comfort of the 

 farm home, he will not stay on the farm. It is not a place to go to make 

 a fortune, and I know men personally who have made a million dollars 

 while I have made a bare living, simply because they loved business while 

 I loved agriculture. And that is the common human experience. It is 

 the love of the farm life. 



Now then, the thing that will make the agricultural life worth while 

 is the social side of it. Amusement and recreation which we have not on 

 these western farms. And the county fair affords the finest, and the 

 only, so far as I know, opportunity for a holiday week in our farm life. 

 The things of the fair, the livestock, our crops, our neighbors, the home 

 folks, are the things that make it worth v/hile. We go off to a state fair 

 and we don't feel at home. I was lonesome in a crowd of 75,000 people 

 down at our state fair this fall. I go out to our county fair in Hall county 

 where I know everybody, and I go out there to go home. When I go to the 

 state fair I am alone. It is at the county fair where neighbors get to- 

 gether, where people know each other, people who understand each other. 



