PROCEEDINGS STATE AGRICULTURAL CONVENTION 173 



the boys' and girls' club work is a big institution in the United States, 

 with 600,000 boys and girls in it. 



I forgot to mention one point I want to mention and that is the fact 

 that while we have in this state 15,000 boys and girls enrolled, we haven't 

 scratched the surface as to possibilities. There are on the farms of Iowa 

 as near as we can get the figures from the census, about 225,000 boys and 

 girls between ten and twenty-one years old, which is the eligible age 

 for this work. When I said 15,000 enrolled you can see we have not 

 scratched the surface, reaching but a small percentage of those who ought 

 to be in the work, so I don't want to leave those figures on your mind 

 thinking they are large and nothing is to be done in expanding them. We 

 haven't begun to reach out and get the boy and girl that ought to be in. 

 You will agree with me that if it is good for those 15,000 to be in this 

 work it would be just as good for the other 200,000 not in it. I believe 

 we ought to all combine our efforts along that line, and if we do it I be- 

 lieve agricultural work in this state will be more effective, and I believe 

 there will be better practices introduced very readily. 



President Cameron : The next speaker on the program is our 

 Attorney General Ben J. Gibson, who I am sure has an interesting 

 message for this convention. 



Attorney General Ben J. Gibson: The fair that is a real success is the 

 fair where everybody, farmers and business men, poor and rich, those in 

 affluence and those in common estate, can just come in there and feel 

 they are just on a level and it is their fair. If you have that feeling you 

 are going to have a successful fair. 



Among the things that appealed to me at the state fair were the horse 

 shoe pitching, the horse racing, and these other things that are good 

 ordinary sports. You know I have always liked to think of the amusing 

 things in life, and in the last two or three years in this state and this 

 nation we, as a people, know that there has grown up in America and in 

 the state of Iowa a sort of condition of mind that has made us grouchy. 

 I don't care whether you are business men or whether you are farmers 

 that same feeling has come to you and it has come to me. Now I am not 

 going to enter into a discussion of why that is or what it is, but I just 

 want to strike this note, that Iowa is the same old state of Iowa; the 

 same wealth, the same farms, the same bordering rivers of the Mississippi 

 and the Missouri, and it is set here just like the same jewel that it was 

 in the years gone by, with the same people, the same magnificent people 

 that in stress of war in 1917 got together as one and lifted Iowa to a niche 

 in American history that it will never be able to forget. In that connec- 

 tion I want to tell you an incident I have told a number of times in the 

 past few years, of the time I passed down by the great library building 

 in New York City during service. As I went by that building my eyes 

 just happened to go up at the motto or sign that was over the building. 

 I imagine there are thousands of other Iowa boys who saw the same sign, 

 and that sign was simply this: "Buy bonds the way they buy bonds 

 in Iowa." I want to tell you that sign was there to tell to the people 

 in New York what was the real patriotic duty of American citizenship. 



