80 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



for many of our products by 50 per cent. I grant that, yet I repeat that 

 it would be a great calamity. The depressing effect of city life upon the 

 farm boys and girls is something which must be seen to be realized. The 

 worst thing we have among our country homes is the shoddy millionaire, 

 who goes to the country and builds a house upon a farm. It is not home 

 for him, but simply a place for advertising his wealth. He places a 

 palace among our farm homes. We sell him our products and get our 

 money for them. Pretty soon we will find our boys and girls trying to 

 imitate the rich. They are beginning to despise the simple, plain, humble 

 life of their father and mother, anxious to get away and carry on the 

 little deceptions of the dress suit case and the music roll. That is 

 often the beginning of a most unfortunate end. As for me, I would 

 rather live on cowpeas and bread and cheese all my life and bring up 

 my children in the fear of God and in the belief of a country home than 

 to take Rockefeller's money and be responsible for what it stands for. 

 You men out here do not yet understand the awful blights with which 

 the eastern farmer comes in contact. There are ten million of people in 

 this country in poverty, that is, they are obliged to depend upon some 

 kind of charity, and seven million of them are children. Do you ever 

 stop to think what that means and what it will mean to your children 

 and their children who follow them? The State of Massachusetts is do- 

 ing one noble thing. They found that by crowding these poverty-stricken 

 children into reform schools that they were making criminals faster than 

 in any other way, so they offered a small price, say $2.50 a week to farm 

 families who would take these little ones and bring them up. Many a 

 farmer's wife was starving for the love of a little child and they took 

 two or more of these little ones into their homes and saved them for 

 society and helped themselves. I know of a man in West Virginia who 

 during his life has taken thirty-seven of these little homeless orphans 

 into his home and made men and women out of every one of them. I 

 know of a man in Indiana who at one time had in his home nine of these 

 little things. You don't feel the necessity for doing these things yet, but 

 the time will surely come with the development of your towns and cities 

 when the overflow of the misfortunes and sins of humanity will roll out 

 upon your farms. If a blight should fall upon the Iowa corn crop and 

 wipe it out from one corner of the State to the other, or upon your tree 

 crop, so that it might stand blackened as with fire, or if a disease should 

 strike your cattle, so that I might travel from one end of the State 

 to the other without the sight of a steer or a cow, it would be a calamity, 

 but it would not ruin Iowa. In ten years, profiting by the mistakes of 

 the past and by the hope for the future, you would regain what you have 

 lost. But let a blight fall upon your child crop, a moral blight, or the 

 blighting of false ideas, and God help the nation or the state which must 

 pay the penalty for it. So I say, do not be in too much of a hurry to 

 develop these great cities in your State. Keep your prairies free, if 

 you can, and hold your farm homes together as long as possible. Learn 

 your lesson from the East, that while the great cities and towns will help 

 your market, yet they send also a blight, which is creeping out to our 

 farms and homes and getting into the best crop that we can raise. 

 I thank you. 



