ELEVENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 343 



some business experience and had caught the scientific spirit from my 

 college education and while the hard-headed common sense of the farmers 

 around me gave them the advantage at first I found in three or four years 

 that I had the advantage of them. You have come up largely from the 

 standpoint of the farmer, just exactly opposite from me. I had grown up 

 as a farm boy but when I went back I had lost all the practical common 

 sense and I made a complete failure. But again, I had got, as I say, the 

 business training and scientific spirit and while I had to learn the partic- 

 ular application of the scientific principles. I set about to do that and in 

 the course of a year or two I could compete pretty well with my neighbors 

 and even some who had been at it a good many years but had not the 

 advantage of a scientific education and I could give them some pointers. 

 I believe that the combination of the theoretic with the old-fashioned, 

 hard-headed common sense must be made in order to bring this thing up 

 on the proper basis to contend -with the hard competition that has set in 

 in foreign business and life in general in this country and solve the prob- 

 lem before us. 



I don't believe anybody realizes how great a problem it is of solving 

 the high cost of living. There are a great many reasons for the high cost 

 of living. For instance, some men tell us it is buying automobiles. When 

 you take a hundred thousand men and put them to doing a cetrain thing 

 you have to feed the hundred thousand men and it puts that much bigger 

 task on society. We have set aside one class of men to build automobiles 

 and another set to steer our men to Canada and the Dakotas and those 

 men make just that much more burden on society to feed and clothe. 

 As society evolves and sets aside these men you always have a larger 

 and more complicated problem on your hands and it becomes all the 

 more incumbent on those who do the producing to keep the production 

 on the same basis as it was before. We have expanded railroads and 

 built thousands of miles of railroad but did you ever think how it tends 

 to make the nation poor for a time? Just take your own problem. Sup- 

 pose you want to build a barn. You think in ten years you will need a 

 barn twice as large and in order to save you will build a great big barn 

 and you are poor for two or three years. It is just the same in the life 

 of a nation. When we undertake to do the many things we are doing 

 these days we do make ourselves poor for a time. It is just what the 

 United States is doing today and this problem from every point of view, 

 the statesman, the laborer, the farmer and the stock raiser, is one of the 

 hardest problems and I believe the largest part of the burden is on the 

 shoulders of the stock raisers. But there is nothing quite so potent as 

 the change in our economic life in this country. I am very glad to wel- 

 come you to the city because of the fact that I feel it is out of such 

 means as this that the intelligence must come that is going to solve the 

 great problems." 



President H. F. Hoffman, Washta, la., responded to the mayor's 

 talk as follows: 



'Tn response to the remarks of the honorable mayor I will say on be- 

 half of the Iowa Swine Breeders' Association that we thank him for this 



