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Then the campaign was carried on over into Texas, in Alabama, and 

 over at Memphis, Tennessee.- Just a minute about the Memphis campaign 

 Memphis put on a campaign that nets them annually a hundred million 

 dollars more business because the farmer thrives. Whenever you can give 

 the farmer money and give him a profit, he is perfectly willing to be taxed 

 for roads, schools, and churches, but he can't buy a school book on twenty- 

 five cent corn. He can't buy education and roads and the things that we have 

 in our cities unless he makes a fair profit over and above all expenses. And 

 that is what we as business men have got to see to in the future; that these 

 forty-five million people on the farms in America have an even break with 

 us in the city, and everything we have in life, and when that comes about 

 there will be a different country, there will be no conflict like we have 

 between capital and labor. Why should not the rural boy and girl have every 

 opportunity in life the same as we have in the towns and cities? Is there 

 any good reason? No! I dare say that the child in the country today doesn't 

 receive forty percent every year in money for its education compared to the 

 hundred percent that is given in the cities. I know it is less than half. One 

 state that has nine thousand rural schools educates half of its children 

 in the schools of the country while the other half are educated in the cities 

 and towns. Eighteen hundred of those schools have no drinking water more 

 than half of them haven't water fit to drink; most of them haven't any 

 foundations, the kiddies' feet are on the cold floors a certain number of 

 months in the year, and no shades in the windows the kiddies' little eyes 

 facing the light, seats too high or too low; one thousand without any toilets, 

 more than half of them with toilets not fit to use. 



The time has come when the American business men, both on the farm 

 and in the city are shown such grave conditions all through this country, 

 that we are going to rise as American citizens, both in the country and town, 

 and we are going to begin at the great base of all economic problems to de- 

 vglop the human side; namely, the home on the farm and the school. That is 

 the basis of it, after -all. When we once get that home, with the right kind 

 of road, there will be a different story to tell. 



Let me cite another case. It was my pleasure five or six years ago 

 to help in a road campaign of twenty-five million dollars in South Carolina, 

 After eight or ten weeks of campaign in forty-five counties I had been telling 

 the people of South Carolina something like this: "Ladies and Gentlemen of 

 South Carolina: I don't want to hurt your feelings, but you used to be 

 second and third in education a hundred and fifty years ago; you were one 

 of the leading states of the Union. Now you have allowed these great states 

 back here Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas to forge ahead of you. 

 Here you are on the seaboard, with the markets of the world at your door, 

 with the wonderful land that you had years ago when you were a great 

 cotton producing state; your forefathers had the first smoke houses, and 

 the livestock and pastures. Now those old hills are washed away and they 

 are all barren, and the rural school is nothing. You have gone down from 

 first and second until you are now the forty-eighth out of the forty-eight 

 states in the Union in education. You are at the bottom of the ladder and 

 you have more poverty than any other state in the Union. You have more 

 pauper counties; you have more counties living on the other fellow. You 

 have more illiteracy. What is the matter? That may hurt, and I say 

 that for you to hear. But what is the answer?" A leading citizen said to me 

 when I left there: "What is the answer?" I answered, "I will not attempt 

 to prove that I know the answer, but I am willing to guess. If my guess 

 is worth anything, here it is: You are poorer than any other state because 

 you have robbed your soil over a greater number of years than any of the 

 other states. You are older than we are. You have robbed yourselves poor." 

 We made an estimate of a million of acres of land. In many cases we found 

 the old fellows who farmed there before the Civil War, we took an estimate 

 of the acreage and yield, and we found out of a million acres sixty to seventy 

 percent were not producing within fifty percent of what they produced sixty 

 years ago. And the answer was the home on the farm and the poor school 



