TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART V 437 



do it; and that's why I am so tremendously interested in that Farm 

 Bureau Federation and its officers, and my contact with them convinces 

 me that they are not the type of farmers that want demagoguing, they 

 want facts and results. (Applause.) 



The bankers of this country, the great majority of them, are in the 

 deepest sympathy with every movement which seeks a more profitable 

 agriculture and a more congenial rural surrounding. Isn't that true? 

 And the banker who calls himself a banker who doesn't feel that way, is 

 no more of a banker than a telephone pole — not a bit more — he is a pawn- 

 broker, that would skin a flee for its tallow. (Laughter and applause.) 



What I want to see, my friends, is a system of farm credits which is the 

 farmers' system, and which is an independent system, and which makes it 

 unnecessary for him to bow the knee to any living human-being this side 

 of Hades to get a loan. (Applause and cries of "Good.") And I say that 

 in the utmost sincerity after twenty years of thinking on farm subjects. I 

 farmed until about ten years ago, and I was trying it 500 miles away from 

 home, and I went busted every year. It won't do; you have to stay on the 

 farm! (Laughter.) 



Can this be done, my friends? Can we work out such a system? You 

 know there isn't anything new under the sun, after all. All things that 

 are new, were at creation's dawn when Adam and Eve were making love 

 in the Garden of Eden. Nothing new! It is only a new application of 

 existing principles that create things that we sometimes call new, that's 

 all. 



Let's see, now! Listen, my friends — ^Am I tiring you out? (Cries of 

 "Go ahead!") Let's see about this a minute! For ten years before the 

 act was passed, there was an agitation for what is known as a rural 

 credits act. * Your fellow-citizen, Mr. Hogan, is now president of the 

 Omaha Land Bank, and your other distinguished citizen. Captain Smith, 

 is my colleague on the Farm Loan Board, and they are both red-headed 

 — one a Scotchman and the other an Irishman. And then the act came, 

 and what is the basis of that act? I assume, Mr. Simpson, that you have 

 a full quarter-section of land. If it is in Iowa, it is good land. If he 

 took his mortgage for the measly sum of $1,000 on the best section of 

 [owa land and undertook to sell it to a New England investor, and he 

 went up there to do it himself, he would likely find himself facing a com- 

 mission on inquiry into his sanity. (Laughter.) If the Pennsylvania 

 railroad or the Frisco or the Rock Island should take one of its great 

 locomotive engines and write a mortgage on it and take that mortgage up 

 to the Exchange in New York and ask them to sell that mortgage, they 

 v/ould put the Pennsylvania railroad into bankruptcy, because they v/^ould 

 at once agree that the president of that company was a crazy man. But 

 under the Farm Loan Act, Mr. Simpson and Mr. Hunt and Mr. Cunningham 

 and Mr. .Howard and Mr. Lever, and hundreds of other farmers in Iowa 

 and Nebraska and South Dakota, get together their mortgages representing 

 rrjillions of dollars, and they put them into the hands of a trustee appointed 

 by the Federal Government, known as a Farm Loan Registrar, and even if 

 he were to take these hundreds of mortgages representing hundreds of 



