THIRTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 451 



The President : The first address this afternoon on the program 

 affords me the pleasure of presenting for the first time to this body, 

 Dr. R. A. Pearson, who has recently been elected President of the 

 Iowa State College. 



ADDRESS. 



DK. R. A. TEARSON. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen: I came into the state of Iowa with the 

 belief that any man is fortunate who is permitted to live and work in 

 this state and I am still holding to that opinion. I have discovered in 

 the short time I have been here that when the state board of education 

 invited me to accept the position of president of the Iowa State College of 

 Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, they did not call me to a position such as 

 is generally or popularly known as an easy job. I have found that there 

 is a great deal of important work requiring my attention at Ames, and 

 I have resolved that for some time to come I shall stay as close to that 

 work as I can in order that I may learn the institution, and after that I 

 expect to learn as much about the state as I can. 



I came here from one of the eastern states which has with others con- 

 tributed a great deal toward the growth of this whole middle western 

 country, and I have been frequently reminded of that fact by meeting 

 men who have gone out of their way to tell me that they came to the 

 state of Iowa from one or another of the of the counties of New York 

 state, and frequently have asked me if I knew where they used to live 

 and the people in those localities. I want to say for the satisfaction of 

 those persons, and for others, and I believe that will include all who are 

 interested in the welfare of the eastern states, that those states made a 

 notable sacrifice for the good of this middle western country many years 

 ago which has never been fully appreciated, but it was made cheerfully 

 and ungrudgingly by the eastern states. About the time that Iowa and 

 Illinois and other states in this neighborhood were being first settled, 

 agriculture in the east was comparatively prosperous, but when this 

 wonderful country was opened up to settlement with its great stretches 

 of fertility which could be obtained, most of it, on very easy terms, many 

 of the brightest and best of the eastern farmers and eastern people moved 

 away from their homes and came here to establish new homes, and the 

 result was there was less interest in farming in the east. Farm values 

 went down, and you who came here from the east and elsewhere soon 

 began to pile up enormous crops to be shipped to the eastern market, and 

 the shipment of those crops required large railroad facilities, and the 

 eastern farmers were called upon to furnish men to operate them. These 

 different conditions served to decrease the demand for land in the east, 

 with the result that values went tumbling. Literally hundreds of mil- 

 lions of dollars represented the decrease in farm values in those eastern 

 states in only a few years' time. I do not believe that in the entire his- 

 tory of our country there has been a larger sacrifice made in a commer- 

 cial way on the part of one section of the country for the benefit of an- 

 other section of the country nor one more cheerfully made than that 



