PROCEEDINGS CORN BELT MEAT PRODUCERS' ASSN. 527 



fered the resolution and put it through the general assembly last session 

 on that subject, namely, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence waterway. That 

 will bring to the cities freighters capable of taking your products, your 

 live stock products and your grain products, taking them abroad without 

 transference to some other vehicle of transportation. That will come. 

 (Applause.) Only I don't know when. Yes, because you know in these 

 times when great sums are spent upon military achievement, it will cost, 

 for instance, only $250,000,000 and will generate as a side issue electric 

 power of nearly 2,000,000 horse power, electrifying a great section of the 

 railroads of the country, releasing an enormous demand for coal in this 

 country and giving us a chance to have motive power that must be run 

 other than by electricity in the great central-west, costing you two or 

 three cents — say two cents — to take your wheat from Duluth to Buffalo, 

 and six or seven or eight cents from Buffalo on the remainnig 300 miles. 



Gentlemen, I am not going to make you a speech. It is late. But let 

 me say this: The great principle in our modern industrial and commer- 

 cial life is thorough investigation and thorough organization, and the idea 

 that the agriculture of the nation need not follow that principle, can 

 neglect it, when all the rest of the world is busy thinking of their share 

 in organization, is a perfectly absured proposition. But now, thank God, 

 through the efforts largely of your secretary, and men like him and Mr. 

 Thorne, we are going to have a study and thorough preparation on the 

 questions of marketing, of financing, of the regulation of the grain ex- 

 changes, of the regulation of the live stock exchanges, and we are going 

 to concentrate the very best brains — that is what we are doing, concen- 

 trating the best brains and the economic forces of the nation upon the 

 problems, your problems and the problems which are also through you, 

 the problems of the nation. 



Now I will say another word. Just a word. I am not one of those 

 who sees the old world destroyed. There is a grave question whether or 

 not through the things in Russia, perhaps the breakdown of Germany, 

 the situation around Smyrna, through the Dardanelles, Europe may not 

 economically break down. I am one of those who believe that the foreign 

 market is a matter of grave importance to the American farmer. I am 

 one of those who feel this, that if we could pacify Europe and put her to 

 work, the demand for food for mouths who have only been a quarter fed 

 would be such that the American farmer would see a prosperity such as 

 we have not seen in years. That leaves entirely out the moral question. 



On the moral question, I believe it is America's duty to co-operate 

 around the council table of the nations, to the end that starvation and 

 desolation and anarchy and Bolshevism and economic destruction shall 

 disappear in Europe. We will start the old world again in her old groove 

 of peaceful effort. (Applause.) 



I congratulate this association upon being the skirmishers, as Mr. 

 Thorne has told you, skirmishers having prescience of the great problems 

 that are now up for agriculture — out on the first fighting line. Now you 

 see things beginning to come your way under the leadership of a Secre- 

 tary of Agriculture. Why, when I think of him being there at these parti- 

 cular times I am reminded of what Queen Esther said to Mordecai. 

 Mordecai wanted Queen Esther to interfere, to appeal to King 



