116 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
to see a good strong plea for what is known as the Davis bill, which 
will give establishment to these secondary schools of agriculture and 
mechanic arts all over the country. I believe every Iowa congressman 
is going to vote for it; all except one have told me they should. The 
great state of Iowa ought to do something for this great movement; you 
are entitled to it. You owe it to your children to give them a chance in 
life, and you know perfectly well that when you send your boy from 
your own doorstep out to the high school you never expect to see him 
back again contented. Why? Because his whole education has been to 
drag him away from that farm and to belittle the occupation in which 
you men are engaged with so much success. 
I am not decrying our present system; it is right for the small per- 
centage of boys and girls who get it — and there are only about three 
per cent of them that do. But I don't believe in making it so top- 
heavy. I believe in bringing up the rear end and giving the 97% an op- 
portunity. 
I am talking to some men of whom it is hard to tell whether you 
are farmers or not. When you come to differentiate between those who 
are city bred and country bred you can't do it any more. Nobody any 
longer wears hayseeds on his coat — or else it is becoming so popular 
that they all do; I don't know which it is. What is there in the city, 
after all, for the farmers? Talk about going to the art galleries and 
looking at pictures 18x24 of some landscape, with its group of trees and 
its brook running here and there, for which a man has paid $25,000 or 
$50,000, when you men can go out and see the great canvas painted by 
the Almighty Himself for absolutely nothing! And then they talk about 
the flowers from the conservatories and about the roses that they have 
in the cities and that you will have here to-night upon your tables! Did 
you ever see your mother come in from her little conservatory back there 
in the garden with that handful of old-fashioned flowers that she had 
grown with her own hands? Was there ever any rose that smelt as sweet? 
There was a joy about that work which no woman ever found who went 
to the hothouse and purchased a bouquet with its seven-foot stems to 
support it. Nearly every man here, I think, remembers that old motto — 
I think it is painted on one of the drop-curtains here in a Des Moines 
theatre — and many of you found it true; you have found "Tongues in 
trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every- 
thing." If the farmer has not done that, I don't know who has. 
There are some great advantages of the man who lives upon the farm. 
In the first place, he has time for reflection. You get into a city even 
the size of Des Moines, and if you catch a man of business on the street 
you find he is always in a hurry; he has his watch in his hand. Half 
the time he hardly takes time to eat, and at five o'clock he closes his 
door and rushes home. Very little of the enjoyment of life he really 
gets, I think; all there is comes from within and not from without. The 
farmer doesn't read as much, probably, as the city man, but he remem- 
bers what he reads, and he thinks about it; and whenever you get a man 
to thinking he is having some enjoyment; he is getting something out 
of life; he is not a mere imitator. The consequence is, as you all know, 
that there are fewer vagaries among the farming population than in any 
