158 



The Dawn of a New Constructive Era 



Demonstra- 

 tion Needed 

 More Tlian 

 Experimenta- 

 tion 



and westward to the Golden gate, the cost of fencing- a single 

 acre had been reduced so that a single toothpick would fence it 

 and leave enough to build a church. (Laughter.) 



Now% we might do a little figuring on the immensity of this 

 cut-over land proposition. Our Chairman told us, on the open- 

 ing morning here, that there w^ere some 70 million acres of this 

 land, and that it would produce, under certain conditions, from a 

 thousand to two thousand dollars' worth of produce. This is al- 

 most enough to give every man, woman and child in the United 

 States a farm of one acre ; and if they were settled on those 

 farms, and each of them produced the minimum of one thousand 

 dollars, the vast sum of w^ealth represented by those farms would 

 be 70 billion dollars ; a sum, by the side of which the 7 billion 

 dollars that our Congress is now being asked to appropriate to 

 finance our army and our navy and the Allied Nations of the 

 world, would be merely the usual 10 per cent waiter's tip. 



But this kind of calculation savors of the millennium ; it is 

 the theoretical view. This convention has to do with not only an 

 average, but with a very practical problem, and the question im- 

 mediately involved now is that of developing and bringing into 

 productive use as much of this land as possible on a purely prac- 

 tical farming basis. 



A good many suggestions have been broached here and a 

 good many ideas have been expressed, w^hich in particular touch 

 upon vital questions involved in the development of these lands, 

 and one of those questions is the desirability of more exact 

 knowledge of how this problem can best be accomplished, both 

 from the standpoint of pure agriculture, and the still larger ques- 

 tion that has been less hinted at — that of the business problems 

 involved. 



Now, I want to discuss those two phases just for a few mo- 

 ments. It has been suggested that we need a lot of experiment 

 stations — a lot of work to find out some of these fundamental 

 facts, these important problems, by actual experimental work. 

 Using the term experiment or experimental research in its 

 strictest sense, I am of the opinion that you do not need it any- 

 thing like as badly as you need the simpler process of demon- 

 stration. If the term "experiment" be limited, as it should be, to 

 original research, the development of new facts on original scien- 

 tific lines, I am of the opinion that we know enough of the fun- 



