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which you are engaged. Participating in such a meeting as this, you are 

 playing the part of statesmen in the truest sense of the word; and I may 

 be pardoned, I feel, if, holding this view of the present conference, I 

 express a feeling of intense satisfaction at finding such a movement led 

 by the Corn Exchange National Bank. One of my family was the first 

 president of this bank, and it was through his efforts that this city of 

 Philadelphia obtained the establishment of League Island as a great 

 Naval Station — a naval station which some day, in time of peril, may 

 prove the salvMion of the whole country. The Corn Exchange Bank, with 

 its associate the Corn Exchange of Philadelphia, * in time of national peril 

 rallied to the support of the National Government, organized and equipped 

 an important regiment of soldiers, and out of a small membership contrib- 

 uted three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars to their support 

 and maintenance. 



These facts are mentioned here, and by me, merely to suggest the 

 thought that the Com Exchange Bank is only following its tradition in thus 

 inaugurating a great national movement like this Agricultural Conference, 

 for participation in, and leadership of, truly patriotic movements has 

 always been the practice of the Corn Exchange Bank. 



In closing, I want to put before you a little picture which always 

 confronts me as the Christmas season draws near, lending to that season 

 a certain note of feeling which it might otherwise lack. Years ago, travel- 

 ing down the Volga, in far Russia, I stopped at a little village where all the 

 people were engaged in making toys — making toys which were sent all 

 over the world at Christmas time, to tell in their own sweet way the story 

 of the Christ to other children and to older folks who still hold the child 

 heart clean and sweet, even if gray hair had come to be their portion and 

 their crown. As I watched these children in this village fashioning toys, 

 little children who as they worked looked out through narrow windows 

 upon a vast stretch of untilled land, land untilled because of bad govern- 

 mental conditions, one of the children dropped the toy upon which she was 

 working upon the hard, earthen floor. I said to my guide, ''Is she ner- 

 vous because I'm watching? " ''No," he replied, "she is weak from hunger. 

 All our children are always hungry." It is a peculiar fact that hunger 

 and harvest have the same root in the Russian tongue; and the saddest 

 music I have ever listened to is the song of the Russian reapers as they come 

 back from the fields after harvest. 



Gentlemen, we are about to enter the Christmas season. Each will 

 find in his own home environment a new reason to love life, a new incentive 

 to make life more lovable for others; and my prayer to you tonight is that 

 you will bear in mind what I have said of these hungry children in far Russia, 

 a land with an area as great as the whole North American continent, and as 

 you remember these other children always hungry, in a land where food 

 should be plentiful, you should ask God to help you to utilize every natural 

 * Today known as the Commercial Exchange. 



