526 TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 



great burden of meeting the most skilled minds in these great problems 

 of transportation as your counsel. Now in addition to all his other honors 

 he is going to carry a military title. He is going to be known hereafter 

 as "the hero of five forks," just as General Butler was in the war days 

 the hero of Five Forks. 



Harry — the idea that I should be speaking of a member of the presi- 

 dent's cabinet by that familiar term "Harry," but I started that way and 

 I am going to continue. He told of that row of three miles of American 

 Marines, how the majesty of the nation spoke in those youth in their uni- 

 forms standing at salute. Oh, yes, it spoke, and those Marines in your 

 heart and mine carry an imperishable memory because it was on the 

 morn when Foch threw like a thunderbolt straight into the brazen face 

 of the enemy the Marines, the American Marines, and started the defeat 

 and started the backward march which brought us the victory in the 

 great war. 



Now, I want to say to you men frankly that I congratulate you upon 

 the best Christmas in several years. Ah, you say, "No." Are you think- 

 ing of the high prices of those war days when all the world was clutching 

 at each other's throats? No, no. By organization, by effort, by think- 

 ing, by making yourself felt in the life of the nation, we are coming up. 

 Prices are better. Normal conditions are being resumed, and there is a 

 national consciousness today on subjects of agriculture such as there has 

 never been in this nation before. So this is a good Christmas, a happy 

 Christmas, and a promising and good new year. 



Mr. Thome spoke of Pittsburgh plus. Over here in the general as- 

 sembly, if I may say a word personal — when I went into the thirty-seventh 

 and served in the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth, when I went in it was 

 because I was born in this state, came from pioneer parents who came in 

 as early as 1842, lived through as a part of that great home-loving and 

 home-seeking movement which peopled this wonderful valley of the 

 Mississippi, and the land, the soil, "the good, gigantic smell of the brown 

 old earth," as Browning puts it, has ever been close to my heart, and 

 over there in the thirty-ninth, the last session, I supported every measure 

 of your Farm Bureau. "Well, Weaver, he is from the city. He comes 

 from Des Moines. What is he doing that for?" Doing it because I know 

 and I have known always what once was accepted as a platitude, but 

 what, as the secretary has said, now is really in the consciousness of the 

 nation: that it is so fundamental that agriculture should be prosperous 

 if we want to have a prosperous national life here at all. 



And Pittsburgh plus — I was going to speak of that — in the thirty-ninth 

 I had the honor to offer the resolution condemning Pittsburgh plus and 

 demanding that the Federal Trade Commission, in behalf of the state 

 of Iowa, should do away with that practice which charges you for all the 

 steel products which you buy, not only the freight from Gary, perhaps, 

 where they are manufactured, but the freight from Pittsburgh to Ga;y 

 as well as from Gary to Des Moines; and we passed it through the gen- 

 eral assembly, and the Federal Trade Commission is busy on the job. 



Not only so — I would not make a special plea here tonight, but I am 

 also interested in another great thing for agriculture in Iowa, and I of- 



