418 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



and we have fallen down in not putting our side oi this proposition before 

 the world as we ought to do. 



Some things asked for by agriculture would be a greater improvement 

 and expansion of the Agricultural Institution at Rome, which, after all, is 

 simply an International crop-reporting organization. We might ask for 

 an improvement of the crop-reporting systems. We might ask for a spe- 

 cial agricultural body- as a part of the permanent organization of the League 

 of Nations, whose duty it would be to safeguard the interests of inter- 

 national agriculture. Then we might ask for the adoption of a set of 

 principles, just as labor is asking. What ought these principles to be? 

 Again there isn't any pi'Ogram. Nobody has formulated such a set of 

 principles. If we send a body over there to do what they can to help 

 agriculture to get a square deal, what are they going to ask for? Nobody 

 knows. We have fallen down in the organization of a national scheme, 

 and we are paying for it right now when we most ought to have it, and 

 fail to produce it. Among these principles might be such things as 

 these: Universal free education in the open country, so that the children 

 in the country would have a recognized right to just as good a training 

 as the children in town. Equal pay for equal skill and equal work — an 

 equal opportunity in many ways, such as hospital facilities, and so on. 

 Equal social reward — the benefits of our modern civilization to be avail- 

 able in the country as in the town. Universal recognition of the rights of 

 farmers to organize, both corporal and otherwise. You know farmers 

 have been indicted for daring to organize for their mutual benefit (the 

 milk producers, I am talking about). The gradual taking of steps which 

 would end tenancy on the farms — ^to get as many farms as possible in the 

 hands of men who own them. In some states, Illinois, for example, 60 

 per cent of the farm land is in the hands of tenants. In Texas it is 50 

 per cent. I do not know what it is in Iowa. This is one of the most 

 critical questions the farmers have to face. No agricultural land ought 

 to be held permanently for renting, and in the end the object should be 

 to get all lands in the hands of the men who cultivate them. Another 

 thing might be to withhold from export supplies which are essential to 

 agriculture. 



I am talking, as you see, in an effort to get a program, because we 

 haven't had, as other interests have had for years, a national organization 

 behind us. 



You will notice, gentlemen, that the demands that have been made 

 in the matter of reconstruction in this country, almost without exception 

 are the demands of small groups of men, asking, nine times out of ten, 

 for the things they wanted before the war, for the benefit of their own 

 group, and leaving entirely out of consideration the great, big questions 

 which deal with the whole nation, and especially is this true that no kind 

 of reconstruction will be any good unless it applies to the three great 

 groups out of which this nation is made — business, industrial labor, and 

 the farmer. 



Now in conclusion I want to read a set of principles adopted the 

 other day by the Agricultural Reconstruction Committee of the National 

 Board of Farm Organizations, a body which represents two million organ- 



