532 TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 



of America. It is not alone a question of making a happy and prosperous 

 social condition on the Iowa farm. It is a question of producing leaders, 

 not alone of agricultual societies and farm organizations, but leaders of 

 the nation. If they are not produced, if leaders and great men are not 

 produced on the farms of the middle-west, where will they be produced? 

 You can not go to New York City or Philadelphia or Boston or Washing- 

 ton and find many of the leaders of finance or industry that are many 

 generations from the soil itself. 



This whole nation has been awakened to the fact that agricultural 

 prosperity is absolutely necessary to national prosperity, as we were so 

 well told last night, in a way, during the last three years, that it never 

 had realized before. As we were told last night, we had a certain big 

 brother sympathy from industries and cities for many years, but during 

 the strenuous times of the last three or four years those industries have 

 found that their sympathy for the farmer, their good-will toward the 

 farmer, was not a matter of mere sympathy for the farmer but the good 

 of the farmer was absolutely one and essential to their good and prosper- 

 ity. The whole nation knows and knows well in a way that it never knevv 

 before that an agricultural collapse means the collapse of the financial 

 prosperity of America, and just so would this country realize that if the 

 splendid rural citizenship of these farms decays so the citizenship of 

 the nation decays. 



But that can not be shown in three years of pinched times on the 

 farm, or two years of strenuous times on the farm, like this financial con- 

 dition and the general relationship, the co-relationship of rural prosperity 

 and national prosperity. I say this other can not be shown so quickly, 

 but once we let the prosperous farmers, the thinking men of our farms, 

 leave those farms on account of lack of prosperity or lack of soil fertility, 

 the nation will sometime find out, as Europe has found out, that it is a 

 decadent civilization, whenever your land is tilled and operated by a pop- 

 ulation, a class that is so low that they can not work out from that class 

 to a higher class. 



You know that the motto of America has been that, no difference 

 where a man stands, he can rise and rise; and that is the citizenship that 

 I am appealing to you for. The basis of the new blood that flows from 

 the farms to the cities, as remote as it may seem, is a rich soil upon 

 which is based a prosperous agriculture. I have not much sympathy for 

 those who come out and tell us about improving the social conditions of 

 the farm. It is absolutely all right, too, in a way, and yet it is not a basis 

 of the foundation. They tell us that if the social conditions of the farms 

 are improved, the young people will stay; they will want to farm; that if 

 we have better modes of transportation, if we have better houses and 

 better homes and better things, the boys and girls will want to stay 

 and help out. 



But I'll tell you what I think will keep the ambitious boy and the 

 ambitious girl on the farm, and I believe that is the only thing that will 

 keep them on there; and that is when they see that there is an oppor- 

 nity to possess and to accumulate and to become prosperous. You are not 

 going to keep a boy that is worth while on the farm just because of a 

 town that he wants to go to, or a fine automobile to ride in, or electric 



