FOURTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 273 



Iowa we are mistaken to some extent. Personally I do not think there 

 is so much in that as we are in the habit of making out. Every man of 

 you looking back to the time of his boyhood, and over the years that in- 

 tervene between that time and this hour is ready to say that all the 

 way through the years, there has been a betterment of conditions in the 

 country in Iowa. This year is better than last year, and last year was 

 better than the year before that, and the last ten years were better than 

 the ten years before. So that I think we must say that rural conditions 

 in Iowa are pretty good now. There are some things that might be bet- 

 ter. Perhaps I may speak of them further on if I do not forget it. 



Now getting up to what I want to say let us ask this question: What 

 has made this prosperous condition in Iowa and in this county possible? 

 I think it is simply transportation. I do not think it is anything else. 

 Without it we should be absolutely back where we were a hundred years 

 ago in a little while. It is transportation that has made the civiliza- 

 tion we enjoy. You who live on the farms, you who are interested in 

 agricultural conditions, you who are interested in managing these af- 

 fairs will remember that before we had transportation in Iowa there 

 could be no prosperity on the farm. It was absolutely impossible. What 

 purpose was there, what interest to a man who had a farm, for raising 

 anything more, or producing anything more than would take care of 

 his family and the animals he had on the farm. There was no market 

 for him, he could not reach a market anywhere with his surplus from 

 the farm. There was nothing to inspire in him any desire for a surplus 

 at all. But when transportation came, and when we reached the money- 

 m.aking age, (that is just when we reached it for we would not be a 

 money-making people if it were not for transportation). The money- 

 making age was reached when we reached the means of transportation 

 which we have in this country. Then began to spring up the factories 

 in the cities, then men began to go to the cities, then the cities began 

 to grow and develop, and then began prosperity on the farm, and it did 

 not begin until that time. 



In place of being a bad thing for the farm it is one of the best things 

 that ever happened in this country, that men did go to the factories, 

 that they did go to the cities, that they did leave the farms and create 

 a market for the surplus of the farms in Iowa, and all the other States 

 in the Mississippi Valley. It was a fine thing that they did that, built 

 these factories, made this market and made this constant demand on the 

 farms for the products of the farm. You talk about "Back to the Farm." 

 Why if you put a hundred thousand people in Iowa back to the farm to- 

 night it would be an injury to the farm and to the farmer, because it 

 would have a tendency to destroy this market that has been created 

 and is furnishing these hundreds of thousands of people, that he is feed- 

 ing. And everyone back to the farm takes away from the demand for his 

 products. It would have a tendency to reduce the price of the things 

 produced on the farm, as it seems to me. 



The implements that have been placed on the farms and that have 

 been invented in the last thirty-five or forty years have multiplied over 

 and over the ability of one man to accomplish on the farm. So that one 

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