430 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



The salaries of our country teachers and our country preachers, and 

 the net return upon the investment of our farms, are the lowest of any 

 other class in America. Do you get that? Listen! To the teacher, who 

 more than any other individual, save the mother, molds the character of 

 the future citizenship of this country, on the average we pay a salary 

 tbat is not much greater than you pay to the char-women who clean the 

 spitoons and scrub the floors of your capitol of the state of Iowa. If you 

 don't believe that, look up the figures. To the man of God, the spiritual 

 leader of 49 per cent of our population, the country preacher, we pay a 

 miserable pittance that doesn't compare to the amount that we in Wash- 

 ington pay to the messengers who wait upon us from day to day. And 

 the figures will demonstrate beyond cavil that for the amount of capital 

 invested, for the amount of brains expended, for the amount of brawn 

 put into it, there is a less return to the American farmer than there is to 

 any other class of people in this country who labor. It is a situation, 

 gentlemen, to challenge the consideration of the wisest of us, when the 

 three essential elements of civilization — the teacher, the preacher, and 

 the man who feeds and clothes us — should be at the foot of the ladder in 

 the scale of wages. 



So much for that. Our country roads, mile for mile, are the poorest of 

 any roads of any first-class civilized nation in the world, with the result 

 that the transportation cost of farm products in America are anywhere 

 from one and a half to three times as great as it is in nations like England, 

 France, Germany, and Italy — before the great world war. 



Our rural women, the mothers of 49 per cent of our population, are liv- 

 ing under the tragic burden of isolation. I heard the wonderful story of 

 that wonderful woman from Indiana this afternoon, and it was worth my 

 two days and two nights on the train to hear that. My friends, without 

 egotism, may I stop to say this? I was the author of the Smith-Lever 

 Act, which is a kind of grand-daddy of your Farm Bureau Federation, and, 

 as the son of a country woman who died when I was a babe five months 

 old, as a country boy who had lived a life of the average country boy, and 

 had known the struggles of the average poor country woman, it was my 

 proud privilege to write into that act that some of this money should be 

 used to teach the country woman and the country girl; and when I shall 

 p.iss over and be gathered to my fathers, I want it writ upon my tomb 

 "Here lies the body of a man w^hose work was the first recognition by a 

 federal congress of the existence of such an individual as the American 

 country woman." (Applause). She works 13 hours a day; it is not in- 

 frequent for her to drop a 5-gallon bucket into a 75-foot well, windlass 

 that up, and then carry that bucket 75-feet into the house, and then 

 lift it up two feet over her head, and then dip it out and use it for cook- 

 ing purposes. That may not be true in Iowa, gentlemen, but it is true 

 in South Carolina. I took occasion one day to satisfy myself to locate the 

 wells on the farms within a distance of twenty miles from my home, to 

 ascertain if they were located with reference to the convenience of the 

 horse trough or the kitchen, and what do you suppose I found? (Laugh- 

 tor). Of course, this is not true in Iowa, but is true in South Carolina. 



