5S2 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



naturally appointed guardians of intellectual and physical health. They 

 are with us to the man. We may count on them in every town and city. 

 Busy as the physician is, and liable to be called away at the very moment 

 when his advice is needed, nevertheless he will prove an unfailing assist- 

 ant and co-adjutor in all the work that lies before us. Business men, too, 

 men of affairs, men of experience know what we seek and the commer- 

 cial value of it. What street in your town shows at this moment highest 

 real estate values? Outside the few blocks devoted to the direct purposes 

 of trade, surely the valuable lots are along that street which has been 

 laid out, best planted with growing trees, best paved it may be, or parked, 

 or laid with walks, midway in grassy borders. Generally all these things 

 go together; just as a man who is careful to wear a good hat or coat will 

 generally see to it also that his boots are clean. Even one fine house 

 or well kept place of residence renders more valuable every bit of real 

 estate in the neighborhood. We all know this, and those who realize 

 it best make most money out of the fact. People who lay out for com- 

 mercial profit additions to our cities invariably plant their plats with trees, 

 advertise parks and boulevards and all these things to prospective or pos- 

 sible purchasers; such men are smart enough for that; and we have the 

 "Highland Park" addition and "Oak Park" and "Kenneth Square" and 

 all sorts of devices of this kind — simply a recognition of the fact that 

 business men appreciate in sensible Americans an innate love of that 

 which is beautiful and orderly and clean and forever new. Is it conceiv- 

 able that we Americans will allow promoters to do these things for us 

 and pay them roundly for it, and yet are unwilling to do the same things 

 for our own profits? 



The time for our efforts is propitious. A wave of enthusiasm in the 

 interest of all sorts of civic improvement and adornment is sweeping 

 the country; we need only intelligent guidance, direction, and our land will 

 soon be the fairest as well as the most splendid on the earth, the most 

 beautiful the sun has ever witnessed in all of the fields of time. But 

 this guiding of a good impulse, this direction we do need very badly. 

 The past is full of mistakes, mistakes easily excusable in view of our 

 peculiar, unexampled history. Our people have destroyed much beauty. 

 It was a goodly land with its open groves, far-stretched flower-bedecked 

 meadows, its clear pellucid perennial streams. Ask your pioneer about 

 it; I may stop to tell it all tonight. I am not a very old man, but I have 

 dipped oar in the Des Moines river away down near its mouth and seen the 

 netted sunbeams on its gravel covered bottom all the way across. Who 

 looking now upon the muddy channel would think of such thing possible? 

 But our people have been careless; as the man, who, while his house is 

 building, suffers the horses of the builders' to gnaw the bark from all 

 the standing trees of his prospective lawn. We have had so much to do to 

 provide shelter that we have not had time to consider beauty. We have 

 been poor; we brought little to the state but willing hands and hearts 

 courageous, and we have not, as the years of labor passed, found much 

 to spend for anything that did not return in cash the interest on the 

 investment and that promptly, ,for we had interest in cash to pay. We 



