TWELFTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART X 439 



better than ours was valued at from $500. 00 to $1,500.00 per acre, and very 

 little of it for sale. When Iowa has a net work of perfect highways, then 

 no state in the union will excell us in the price of our farm lands. These 

 desirable conditions will obtain just as soon as Iowa farmers are con- 

 vinced that good roads are a farm asset. I am not so foolish as to ex- 

 pect that you will all agree with me as to the practicability of construct- 

 ing permanent public roads in Iowa. It will require time and study, per- 

 haps, before you are convinced of the necessity for such roads and of 

 their intrinsic value in adding to the sum of your possessions. If your 

 farm now worth $30,000 00 can be increased to $50,000.00 by the construc- 

 tion of permanent roads adjacent thereto at an expense of not to ex- 

 ceed $6,000.00, it should be considered a legitimate and profitable invest- 

 ment. All I can hope to accomplish in this address is that you will con- 

 sider and study the matter from the viewpoint of good roads being a farm 

 asset. 



FACTORS IN THE LIFE OF FARM GIRLS. 



Margaret C. Anderson. 



(In The Breeder's Gazette.) 



Rural parents are failing to realize the child-nurturing possibilities of 

 their background. The picture of the boy or girl on the farm crushed 

 by the monotony and drudgery of enforced labor or — just as bad — starving 

 for the sympathy and interest and mental stimulus that are commonly 

 denied, is not a pleasant one to study. We look with horror upon crimes 

 far less destrictive and heart-breaking than this crime — of well, let us call 

 it sluggishness. But there is a big work being done in behalf of farm 

 boys and girls which opens up, particularly to the farm mother, glorious 

 new visions of some specific ways in which country life may be made 

 yield its best, to justify itself, to the growing, outreaching, eager boy 

 and girl. In the first place, let the farmer get rid of the idea that he must 

 move to town "to educate his children." That idea is fraught with tragedy 

 in many instances. The back-to-the-country movement has no more vital 

 significance than in its relation to the young farm people who so often, 

 on leaving home, sacrifice the chance of becoming potential units in order 

 to become futile atoms in the great whirl of city life. Of course in some 

 cases to prevent a country boy or girl from getting into the larger oppor- 

 tunity of the city is to kill a fine, aspiring spirit, to stamp out a life that 

 is capable of being lived more abundantly in the atmosphere of a city's 

 progress. But about this type we need not be so intensely concerned. 

 He is so in earnest as to what he wants that he helps himself to get it. 

 He makes his own opportunities. It is rather to those young people who 

 are dissatisfied with what many farm homes have to offer them; who feel 

 vaguely that they might better things and yet do not know just how to 

 go about it; and to those farm parents who are uncomfortably conscious 

 of their children's rebellion but do not know how to meet it — it is to these 

 that modern agricultural leaders are talking with so much comprehension 



