278 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



That is what government is for, gentlemen. It cannot be for any- 

 thing else and be any right sort of government. It was the great Eng- 

 lish philosopher Locke who said that government is for the good of man- 

 kind, and Spencer said that no man had ever given a definition of gov- 

 ernment that was equal to that. When you come to look at government 

 as a thing that is for the good of mankind, and if it exists for that 

 alone, then all of our laws, then all that we do in a public capacity as 

 we do in these fairs, will be directed to the good of mankind, to the 

 good of the community in which the fair is held, to the benefit of that 

 community, to make rural life better, to make crops better, schools bet- 

 ter, roads better, everything that goes into the life of great people bet- 

 ter by the exhibitions that are given. 



Now this is something of my conception of what a county fair should 

 be and do. I have never managed one. I might not be able to bring that 

 about at all, but we have our ideals, you have your ideals about what 

 a thing ought to be, and we are struggling toward our ideals, always 

 struggling in that direction. How fine a thing it is when men have ideals 

 that simply blaze and burn in the interest of humanity and will press 

 on toward them, never faltering, but moving in everything that they 

 do, in every organization that is public in its nature for the public good. 

 So that I say it seems to me that that ought to be the ideal that enters 

 into the purpose of a fair. That is the purpose of our great State fair I 

 am sure. No other State in the Union begins to equal it or can be com- 

 pared with it. It is a great educational force for the people of the State 

 of Iowa, and that is what it should be. It should educate them along all 

 of these lines that I have suggested, and the county fair, in a smaller 

 way perhaps, should do the same thing. That should be its aim, its 

 end, and its ever constant purpose. So, it strikes me, that is what you 

 ought to aspire to in our county fairs. I think that we ought to teach 

 through these things what the most successful life is and how to reach it. 



If it is a fact that our rural schools have made no progress for fifty 

 years, isn't it a sad commentary upon us that we have given more atten- 

 tion to the material, and thought more of it, than we have thought of 

 the intellectual? Gentlemen, you never can get anything into the state 

 permanently of good, concrete, sound value until you have put it into your 

 schools. It must get there eventually if you want it in your State finally. 

 It must be in the schools, and no State can ever rise very much higher 

 or go very far beyond its schools, beyond its educational facilities. I 

 mean by that, that it is not wealth alone that makes a State. You may 

 acquire great material wealth and you may so conduct your civilization 

 and your wealth as a people that you may grow boundlessly rich, but 

 unless your people are strong intellectually you can not be a great State 

 or a great people. We must look to our schools for the future men and 

 women of this State, and for the future greatness of the State. We must 

 do that because you can not rise above your schools. Dollars do not 

 raise men and keep them up. They may go up a while so far as prosperity 

 is concerned, but if the foundation of our citizenship is not built upon in- 

 tellect, and upon intellectual and moral worth, finally our civilization 

 will topple over. So I say that what you do in a public way in our county 



