154 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



the statement to him and he thought it was not so. "Well, sir," I said, 

 "hold on a minute. Look at this family who lives at the east endi of our 

 farm, a father and five sons. Do y ou remember when one of them was a 

 witness. in the Circuit Court, and"he was obliged to sign his' name and he 

 could not write it? Do you remember that, and do you remember the 

 scoring the Judge gave him and said to him, 'Young man I would never do 

 another hand 'si turn until I could w rite my name. ?' There are five families, 

 not within stone's throw, but in gun shot of your own home. Go over here 

 to another man's home, can he read and write? 'No.' I don't believe he 

 could. Co a little farther down th e road, the first house on the corner." 

 "Hold on, I guess you are right," my husband says to me. Isn't it a fearful 

 thought that is being bought by blood and preserved by prayer and tears; 

 that the balance of power is in the hands of ignorance. I tell you one of 

 the greatest needs of today is an educated, intelligent voter. I do not mean 

 that they shall be men who can just read and write, but I mean an edu- 

 cated intelligent ballot, a ballot that is not wedded to party, a ballot of 

 principle. 



This last summer I was greatly impressed by some of those wonderful 

 pictures of wonderful war ships. I remember distinctly now' a picture of 

 the Oregon and I would look at it and study it, with her fine guns and 

 mountings, and I read about her and the thought that impressed me so was 

 not the gun, not those fine mountings, not her armour-clad sides, not the 

 beauty with which she rode the water, but the fact of an intelligent skilled 

 man behind all that ponderous machinery. There was behind that machin- 

 ery cultivated intelligence to its almost highest thought of conception 

 Friends today behind every plow there stands a man and I tell you that one 

 of the greatest needs of the hour is that the man that stands behind the 

 plow, that guides the furrows, that gives bread to the millions of this 

 world, should be a man of the highest intelligence, and the highest pos- 

 sible cultivation; even the man that holds the plow, the farmers, the tillers 

 of the soil, needs today to measure up beside any other man that walks 

 God's footstool in intelligence, manhood, refinement, and all that goes to 

 make the noblest on the face of G od's earth, a noble man. 



