400 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



is headed by, perhaps, the best man on statistics in the United 

 States today, on railroad statistics, I mean, Clifford Thorne. 

 (Applause). That transportation bureau has been busy and will 

 continue to be busy as the years go by. There is always work 

 to do. The railroad people are looking after their interests, and 

 we are not blaming them for that ; all we have to blame is our- 

 selves if we sit still and don't get busy to look after our own in- 

 terests. 



What can the farmers of the United States do individually? 

 How far can we get all by ourselves? Think of those questions 

 when some one whispers in your ear that there is no good in or- 

 ganization. I have heard men say that the farmers cannot organ- 

 ize. I will admit to you that the farmers, perhaps, are the hard- 

 est class of people in the United States, or any other country, to 

 get into a comprehensive organization. I would not give as a 

 reason that the farmers haven't brains — they have. They have 

 brains that are cultivated out in the open ; brains that are culti- 

 vated in pure air, and exercise that gives them good bodily 

 health, unless they get too much of it, and some of them do. In 

 fact, all of them have been getting too much of it. I heard ex- 

 plained the other day why the farmers are hard to organize, and 

 I believe it is pat. It may help you a little in staying by your 

 organization. You know that every other interest is organized 

 and has been organized for a good many years. They have been 

 getting beneficial results for their class of people. The laboring 

 people, taken as a whole, are in a way a machine ; they are work- 

 ing for some corporation, they have a special work to do, they 

 have some one to tell them every day to do that job, and they are 

 used to being told to do things ; therefore when they are told to 

 join an organization, to get the benefits that ought to come to 

 them, it isn't any trouble to get them in, it isn't any trouble to 

 hold them there. But the farmer, who has been going indepen- 

 dently and alone all these years, nine out of ten of them having 

 been their own boss — they have not had much to boss, but they 

 have been fooling themselves in thinking that they have been 

 their own boss and they have been absolutely independent of 

 everybody else — in a way they have, in conducting their little 

 farm, nobody has told them what to do ; they have gone ahead do- 

 ing the things that they saw fit to do. In other words, they have 

 not been dictated to, they have been independent, and for that 

 reason it may be a little hard for them to start out on an organ- 

 ization program. It may be that that is the solution of why the 



