108 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



Now I want, to make a suggestion, and then I am through. We are 

 having good times in Iowa now. You fellows have made more money 

 while you slept in the last Ave years than you ever made in your lives 

 before, or your fathers ever made before you. Unfortunately, the prices 

 of the things you sell off the land are high, and so you are getting rich 

 ■ — or think you are, which is about the same thing. You are making 

 money, or think you are. But I advise you not to put your hands in your 

 pockets and say that you are Napoleons of finance and wonder why your 

 sons or nephews who work farms don't make money the way you do. You 

 didn't make any money; you simply took in the unearned increment. By 

 and by some Lloyd George will come in and cabbage on to that unearned 

 increment, if you don't look out. In the future we have got to hang to- 

 gether or hang separate, whichever you like. The suggestion that I want 

 to make is that you begin to get together and understand each other. 

 You have made a beginning right here; in fact, I am surprised to see 

 how many of you do hang together. And then I am surprised at the 

 number of people who won't hang with you when it comes to selling 

 your stock. 'J'he great trouble with us is that we are all too strong in- 

 dividually and don't feel the need of pulling together. The farmers all 

 over the United States don't know each other. They have been dumped' 

 in here from every country in the world, or the best countries in the 

 world— England, Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany 

 and Prussia — and they haven't lived long enough together to really see 

 eye to eye. We must learn to get together. I am not a granger, as you 

 know, but when we were down in New England and met delegates from 

 Massachusetts and New York we found that wherever there were granges 

 all over the country they had a better social life than where there were 

 not. We found that they were able to work together, particularly in life 

 insurance and some of the smaller forms of co-operation. I invited the 

 National Grange to come out here, because I wanted them to see you 

 and you to see them, in the hope that their example would lead to a bet- 

 ter development of the social life in the country in this state and adjoin- 

 ing states. The trouble with us is that we are all looking to town. 

 The farmer longs for the day when he can go to town and when he 

 won't even need to read an agricultural paper. That is the reason so 

 many of them die early; they miss the stimulus that a good agricultural 

 paper gives them. They need it just as much in town as they do on the 

 farm, or they will get dyspeptic. That is the reason there are so many 

 towns full of dried up farmers. You want to get your ideas turned away 

 from that; you want to develop a social life of your own. The mer- 

 chant doesn't want you in his store; he doesn't ask you to his house; you 

 are not interested in the things that he is. Why should you cultivate 

 his society and come to town to learn to play bridge, and mortgage your 

 farms to buy automobiles? What we want is to understand each other 

 and farm and develop social life in the country. There must be some 

 nucleus to gather around. In some places it is a grange, and I found in 

 Kansas when I was out there for institute work that wherever I would' 

 strike a neighborhood with a grange I would find better social life, bet- 

 ter farms and better people, due to the education that the grange gave. 



