EIGHTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII. 271 



me a man or organization tliat does things and does them well and you 

 will not have to look elsewhere for the successful man. Let us keep 

 this in mind for the next year and the Iowa State Dairymen's Associa- 

 tion will not regret having held its meeting in the city that "does 

 things." 



The Chairman: We will now hear from Hon. H. R. Wright. 



ADDRESS. 



H. R. WRIGHT, DAIRY AND FOOD COMMISSIONER, DES JIOINES. 



Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: 



I suppose that most of you people remember my embarrassment at 

 Cedar Rapids last year. I said I was more or less at a loss to find a 

 proper subject to talk on on an occasion like that, but I reckon tonight I 

 have the right subject to bring before the buttermakers and I am not 

 so very much put out because the people of the city are not here, because 

 the things I intended to say, if I had had the time to put them together, 

 are things best said to you alone. 



Those of you who read your bibles, and I hope you all do, will re- 

 member that early in the first book of the bible there is a reference made 

 to the product in which we are all interested. There is a story there of 

 how Father Abraham had a very important visitor and, like the rest of 

 us, he put up a good feast for his guest and, while the bill of fare was 

 not given, the one particular thing mentioned that he fed him was butter 

 and the context showed that he produced the butter at that feast because 

 it was a delicacj', a thing which added to the meal which he su'pplied for 

 his honored guest. If you will read the history of the beginning of other 

 civilized races, you will find similar accounts of the manufacture and use 

 of butter. It is true that the civilized nations of the world are character- 

 ized by the manner of their living in particular and in all of those cases 

 the use of butter is one of the things which has become a necessity. So 

 down the history of time, from Abraham to the present, butter has been 

 considered one of the foods that all civilized people have used. Indeed, 

 so much is this true that with us, not only now, but for the last one 

 hundred years, butter has been considered one of the necessities of life — 

 bread and butter — so that we are accustomed to think of having butter 

 at our meals the same as we expect to have anything else to eat. 



The developments in the butter industry in the last quarter of a 

 century have given butter a place as a commercial article which it did not 

 have in the early times, did not have until the advent of the creamery 

 system, refrigerator cars and methods of getting it to market and dis- 

 tributing it to the people. But from the beginning of things down to the 

 present time it was supposed that butter was a good article of diet, that 

 it held an honored place in the list of foods which people usually eat and 

 that it was nutritious and that it was wholesome. 



You people have heard a good deal about the quality of butter, but 

 the phase of it that I am going to talk about has nothing to do with the 

 question of whether it brings extras or not. We have come to the time 



