NINTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 113 
close to the soil but what he harked back to it at some time. The strength 
of England today is due to the fact that London is simply the gathering- 
place for the English gentry. When business is over they go to their 
country-places; they really live out on the farm. And you are going to 
see in this country some day a going back to the old preserve, just as 
they have done in England for centuries. Where do the artists go to 
paint? Not down on the Bowery or on Broadway or on Fifth Avenue. 
They take their palette and their colors and go out into tne country for 
some nice landscape. And then the man wno is poetic doesn't sing of 
sky-scrapers and that sort of thing, but with Bryant and Burns he sings 
of Nature and her glories. And so in this social life in the city, when 
you see the better part of it, they are, as I say, harking back to the farm, 
whence the most successful ones of them originally came 
There are advantages, of course, in the city — many social advantages 
which cannot be had upon the farm. And here we get a lesson that I 
hope this country life is going to take up, and that is that we have al- 
lowed social affairs in the country to degenerate. We have no such social 
gatherings as we used to have in my boyhood days. We are having a 
revival of them in some places. We are trying to establish the old de- 
bating club— and I saw evidence of it here a few minutes ago — and the 
old spelling bee. There ought to be a place in every township where 
they could get together in a social way and have either the old husking 
bee, spelling bee, or things of that sort. There is where, as I said be- 
fore, you will find true democracy. You will find there is no caste there; 
you will find very few classes among the farmers. 
Of course, I know the telephone and rural mail delivery have made 
many changes, but man is a gregarious being and he needs and demands 
social relations with his neighbor, and he ought to have them; and you 
men, when you come to revise the public school system, ought to see 
that there is a central school, not only for school purposes, but for 
social gatherings as well. And then don't forget to have a church too; 
it is a great social institution and should be sustained if there were 
nothing else in it than that feature. 
I want to refer just a little to this matter that the President has 
taken up; I am glad he has. It is not enough to say that there are 
other things that he should have taken up in its stead. I really 
think that probably the slums of the cities demand more attention than 
life on the farm; but life on the farm demands attention, and I am very 
glad the President has taken it up, and that our own Henry Wallace is 
one of the members of that commission. 
Somebody said the other day that the trouble on the farm resulted 
from three things: first, we must have better farmers; second, we must 
have better business methods; third, vre must have better living (when 
speaking of the farm life.) I want to refer just a few^ minutes to these 
items hastily. 
A distinguished man in this state once said that no man could raise 
and sell corn at 20 cents a bushel at a profit, and people laughed at 
him; but I want to say that I don't believe any man can do it on land 
that costs $150 an acre — that is, unless he increases the yeild per acre. 
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