DRY-FARMING CONGRESS, WICHITA, 1914 



147 



debt to agriculture is greater than that of any other city; and it is in 

 payment of that debt and in encouragement of the cause of agriculture 

 that it was induced to offer the trophy to be competed for, which I am 

 about to have the pleasure to present. 



We believe, up in Chicago, that what is most needed in the United 

 States today to insure its permanent prosperity, to preserve the even bal- 

 ance which ought to be preserved, is that everything possible should be done 

 to encourage agriculture. 



We believe that the greatest embarassment which confronts America 

 in the near future is the possibility of her not being able to feed her own 

 people. The proportion of our population engaged in agriculture has been 

 constantly failing while the proportion engaged in other industries has 

 been rising and we are just at the point where a year or two or a partial 

 crop would put us face to face with the problem of finding, from s me other 

 country, the foodstuffs to feed our people. 



We are talking of the extension of our trade into foreign lands. We are 

 talking, with a good deal of assumption, that the markets of South America 

 await us. We are saying that the Chinese are longing for our goods, and 

 there seems to be a disposition to take advantage of that particular con- 

 dition and start up the wheels of industry and turn out the manufactured 

 product, but all of the advantage that we can possibly have of that kind 

 will be more than offset if we are going to have to buy what we eat, 

 somewhere else. What the United States needs today more than any other 

 thing is to have the productive capacity of the acres under the plow in- 

 creased and to bring other acres under the plow. It is the big problem 

 of the country and we are going to feel it more and more until these acres 

 are brought under the plow. 



It is a particularly pleasant thing that one of our states which we 

 have a right to call the baby has been successful in this contest. I take 

 it that there has been more or less interest in Arizona since it was first 

 organized into a territory because there was never a moment when Arizona 

 has permitted her identity to escape the rest of the people. I am not sur- 

 prised that Arizona has won this competition, because Arizona has a way 

 of making a noise all the time, and you really find she has something to 

 make a noise about. There is an impression that Arizona is a land that is 

 given over to cactus and sagebrush and stones, etc., and that her popula- 

 tion is largely cowboys and others half wild, but it is a particularly pleas- 

 ant thing that that state has shown all the rest something else than cactus. 



Mr. McOmie, as the representative of Arizona, I congratulate you, sir, 

 I congratulate you personally, on the part you have had in the arrangement 

 of the exhibit — I congratulate you as a citizen of the state and I trust, sir, 

 that the pleasure you may have in exhibiting this trophy may be one-half 

 as great as the pleasure of the Chicago Association of Commerce is in pre- 

 senting it. 



SECRETARY FAXON: 



It would be highly appropriate, of course, for Mr. A. M. McOmie, as 



