SOME NEXT STEPS 185 



our cotton to the extreme northeast corner of the United States for 

 manufacture, then ship the product back again to the center of popula- 

 tion, which even now is just across the Indiana line. The Middle 

 West will not always buy its steel at "Pittsburgh plus" when most of 

 the ore comes from Minnesota and down the lakes to Gary and Joliet. 



Dr. Burrill of blessed memory used to speak of Illinois as an 

 imperial state. And such it is, for it lies at the very center of the 

 greatest agricultural region of the earth, when land and climate and 

 people and possibilities are all considered. 



She has a people unexcelled ; she has a soil capable of supporting 

 an immense population, with coal everywhere just under the feet. A 

 rolling surface presents no obstacles to land transportation ; and with 

 open waterways both to the Atlantic and to the western coast of 

 South America, the advantages of these natural conditions are obvious. 

 A boat sailing from Chicago is halfway across the Atlantic when 

 it emerges from the mouth of the St. Lawrence. The line is almost 

 direct from Chicago and St. Louis through the Panama Canal to 

 the west coast of South America, a continent which lies almost 

 entirely east of Buffalo. If the upper Mississippi valley, therefore, 

 is at all alive to its possibilities, we shall see in the immediate future 

 a new agriculture, if not a new civilization, centering in Illinois, 

 which will then become not only the agricultural but also possibly 

 the industrial and commercial center of the world. It does not re- 

 quire the vision of a prophet to foresee in the upper Mississippi Val- 

 ley a teeming population given to manufacture and trade and sup- 

 ported and fed by an intelligent and a prosperous farming constituency. 



The first steps have been taken in finding ways to make our 

 agriculture permanent and also comfortable. To make it profitable 

 we must prosecute assiduously our scientific and economic studies, in 

 order to furnish the facts upon which our leaders must depend for 

 successful practise. To make agriculture comfortable we must as 

 soon as possible enter upon an era of building permanent farm homes, 

 equipping them with modern conveniences, and surrounding them with 

 every feasible form of outdoor beauty real homes where typical 

 American children can be born and nourished, drinking in with every 

 breath the spirit of a free and a prosperous, self-governing and self- 

 directing civilization. 



In all this development the University can be especially helpful, 

 particularly because of the fact that the separate units are in general 

 too small to engage the interest of professional architects and landscape 

 gardeners. It can do much by way of inventing and disseminating 



