Chapter XIII: Section VIII: The Congress shall have power (3)

In conserving vitality, the child must have physical defects removed as far as possible, then he must be brought up amidst healthful surroundings and itself trained in all that conserves health. This great State of Indiana has already taken steps in this direction. The 67th General Assembly ordained that the schoolhouses hereafter built shall be sanitary in all particulars. This means, that waste of money and waste of child strength and happiness, shall cease in this fair State so far as this one matter goes. The same assembly has given permission to school authorities to institute medical inspection of school children that they may be relieved of morbid physical conditions which cause pain, inefficiency, illness and early death. It was a marked forward step to grant this privilege but it was a mistake of the Legislature in favor of loss of vitality not to make this practical care of children compulsory. Physical strength is the fundamental requirement for the making of children into educated and moral citizens. There is now a world-wide movement led by Switzerland and heathen Japan to save children and make them strong. A Japanese physician traveling in this State said—“We have relatively fewer short graves in our cemeteries.” The intelligence and business sense of a community could be accurately measured by determining its relative number of short graves. Youth is the time to serve the Lord. We must train the body in youth as well as the mind or the opportunity to conserve vitality is largely lost. A far better business scheme than securing more factories would be for the business men to turn their attention to the conservation of human vitality. The returns would be immense, failure to score in such an effort is impossible.

Hygiene has been permitted to extinguish cholera and yellow fever, and by the grace of private benefaction it will soon banish hookworm disease which now incapacitates 2,000,000 people in the South. And may God hasten the business men to permit hygiene to banish those twin leprosies, syphilis and gonorrhea, which are important factors in the causation of insanity, crime, and pauperism, and which so fearfully wreck the lives of so many innocent women and children as well as wreck the lives of the guilty. (Applause.) Syphilis and gonorrhea are responsible for the existence of a large proportion of defectives of various kinds which fill our institutions. Let hygiene drive these plagues away, and, Indiana, instead of building another insane hospital, for another million dollars, which she must shortly do, could donate one of the five now existent to educational use of some kind. (Applause.) I strongly advise Indiana to listen to the health cranks if she wishes to save health, time and money.

SAVING VITALITY.

“_Strength, Endurance and Fatigue_, are the three great elements to be considered in conserving life. The measure of strength is the force a muscle can exert once, the measure of endurance is the number of times it can repeat an exertion. Fatigue is caused by fatigue poisons, which must be removed from the body during rest, principally during sleep.

Anything, therefore, which reduces strength and lessens endurance and prevents removal of fatigue is inimical to vitality conservation.”

SCIENCE OF LIVING.

The science of living begins at the mouth. Barring the taking of drugs, as a man eats and digests his foods so he is. Owing to drug taking and errors in human feeding, disease is latent in man at all times. Only a few escape sickness and pain and die natural deaths. This is not as nature would have it. Josh Billings, recovering from heart trouble caused by the excessive use of tobacco said—“Nature made us all right, we make fools of ourselves.” Other drugs which are of almost universal use and which affect heart, nerves or efficient elimination are coffee, tea, spices, cocaine, morphine, chloral and alcohol. (Applause.) All of these are drugs, and all are poisons, and all more or less disturb the vital functions, reducing vitality and efficiency.

Any departure from unstimulated nutrition works harm. Stimulated nutrition is unnatural, and perforce, is opposed to strength. Immoderate eating—feasting and gluttony—reduce vitality and induce disease with its consequent inefficiency. A very old adage says—“Most men dig their graves with their teeth.” The old time author of this was striving for the conservation of human vitality. Immoderate amounts of nitrogenous foods, exemplified in white of egg and lean meats, cause auto-intoxication. They do this by undergoing putrefaction in the digestive tract, thus making toxins, which in turn being absorbed into the body, cause the following train of ills which results in loss of vitality and efficiency. Some of the auto-intoxication or over-eating ills, are—biliousness, coated tongue, foul breath, clammy hands, clammy feet, dry lusterless hair, putty complexion, dulled hearing, dulled vision, dulled taste, dulled smell, early loss of memory, loss of continuous thought and attention, headaches, vertigo, dyspepsia, loss of strength, rheumatism, insomnia, fugitive pains and aches, hysteria, nervousness, nightmare, irregular heart, shortness of breath, brittle nails, dry harsh skin, cancer and premature old age of the doddering and slobbering kind. (Applause.)

Until we learn and practically apply the science of living we cannot attain over 50 or 60 per cent. efficiency and must continue to live lives of sickness, pain and disease, and die before the natural duration of life has one-half expired; and if this does not hinder and delay the conservation of natural resources nothing will.

“_Over-fatigue_, is a cause of loss of vitality. The present working day from a physiological standpoint is too long. Over-work better expressed by the term over-fatigue, starts a vicious circle leading to the craving of means for deadening fatigue, thus inducing drug habits and drunkenness.”

“Experiments in reducing the length of the working day show a great improvement in the physical and mental efficiency of laborers and results in an increased output sufficient to pay the difference. However, the great justification of the shorter day is found in the interests of the race and nation, not the employer. Public safety requires, in order to avoid railway collisions and other accidents, the prevention of long hours; lack of sleep and undue fatigue is quite as great as the waste from serious illness. A typical succession of events is, first, fatigue, then “colds,” then tuberculosis, then death. In order to prevent in the beginning this increasing line of destructive agencies, undue fatigue must be prevented.”

HEREDITY.

Vitality largely rests upon inherited qualities. A child born of weak parents, those parents having received their weakness by inheritance, will itself be weak in the same way. Idiots breed idiots. Whatever improvement the child may enjoy, must rest upon its inherited foundation. If a child inherits brown eyes they must stay brown, no amount of cultivation may change their color, but inherited weak sight may be improved to a greater or less degree. Two forces, therefore, control vitality, namely, conditions preceding birth and conditions during life. In other words, the foundations of vitality are wholly inherited, and may be cultivated to the degree the inherited foundations will permit.

A perfectly sound physical and mental inheritance is rare and is the greatest of all assets. The highest development of a nation will begin when the human law conforms to God’s law of development and parenthood is denied to defectives. Prisons and asylums are now sufficiently numerous, as it is evidence of defectiveness of the masses to conduct our affairs so as to necessitate their increase. Indiana now has five great insane asylums, each representing about one million dollars, and there are enough insane in jails, poorhouses and in homes to fill another one. Our population increased 16 per cent. in the last decade and insanity increased 29 per cent. There is a business problem for you.

To go along in the future as in the past, permitting, even fostering the production of the hereditary insane, of the hereditary pauper and criminal, of the hereditary idiot and feeble-minded, and then building great palaces in parks to care for them, will mean we have not the common horse-sense necessary for the proper conduct of our affairs. (Applause.)

HYGIENE.

We must look to hygiene, the science of health, to conserve human vitality. The term includes every necessary force to prevent disease, to increase strength and endurance, and to prevent the production of the unfit.

The ponderous and oppressively costly courts have been grinding for centuries and crime increases. Punishment and fear of punishment restrain evil doing, but does not eradicate the tendency to evil. This and other defects we must, as far as possible breed out of the race, and science can find a valid answer for every objection which obstructionists can raise to this proposition. Fostering insanity, crime, pauperism and imbecility, is not evidence of understanding and of high ability.

The divisions of hygiene are: Federal, State, Municipal, Institutional, School, Domiciliary and Personal.

Hygiene not only makes for greater physical strength and endurance but it makes for greater moral strength. It is the essence of charity, kindliness, patience and truth.

When, through hygiene, defectives, delinquents and dependents are no longer propagated, when simplicity and frugality of living are achieved, voluntary celibacy and voluntary childlessness will become discreditable, and sickness, disease and premature death will disappear before temperance and sanitized homes.

President WHITE—This admirable paper causes me to say to every one here that they cannot afford to go away and not deposit a dollar with the Secretary for the book of the Proceedings of this Congress. The book of these admirable and practical addresses should be in every home, should be in the library. I hope that every one will leave their address, will register, and receive as soon as they are published a copy of the Proceedings. (Applause.)

It was Louis D. Brandeis who said a year or two ago that the railroads of this country could save a million dollars a day with practical economy and with good system. He got that idea from and quoted Mr. Harrington Emerson of New York City, who will now address this audience upon “The Rescue of the Fit.”

Mr. EMERSON—Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: There is a growing clash between employer and employe. The old order is passing away and the new order has not yet come in. The millions lost in strikes are forever wasted. This direct waste due to supposed conflict of interest is one of the great losses. The other is more serious. Not one man in ten is in the place in the world best fitted for him, not one place in ten is filled by the best man in the world for the job. When the job is not bossed by the right man and when the man is on the wrong job there is a waste whose magnitude is incalculable. It is to mitigate, palliate, obviate, these two great sources of waste that on a large scale a new plan is being put into operation. The theory that underlies it is founded on principles, not on empiricism or on tradition or on rule of thumb.

It is theory that has given us the best designs for steam turbines, gas engines, dynamos, aeroplanes—it is theory that gives us this plan of the _Employment Department_.

What is the theory?

All manufacturing costs fall under three divisions: Materials, Labor, Equipment Charges.

Materials means all materials, whether for manufacture or operation.

Labor means all personal service or personal charges, whether direct, indirect, supervising or managing.

Equipment charges are made up of taxes, insurance, depreciation and interest on investment.

Although these three classes of expense are so different there are some general economic laws which apply to all of them and it is quite certain that what we have learned to accept as to materials, may have some lessons applicable to personal service and to equipment charges. When our building materials consisted of prairie sod the problem was simple, we picked out the best sod in sight, plowed it up, hauled it to one side and erected it into walls. When the task is to build an automobile the handling of materials is not so simple.

In automobile plants the engineering department designs what is wanted, then draws up specifications, precise and scientific specifications; steel that will test under tension or torsion so many thousand pounds, steel balls, that are so round, so hard, so even in size, bronze, that is so resistant, copper that is so pure, etc.

The purchasing department then calls for tenders or for bids. Samples or specimens are submitted for test and these go into the testing laboratory where they must come up to specifications. The purchasing agent says: How good a wire can you sell me for $0.10 a pound? What will the price be on wire testing 200,000 pounds?

The materials having been tested and bought are put into the storehouse under a competent storekeeper. It is his business to see that they do not spoil, that they are not wasted or stolen. He issues only on requisition, the requisition specifying the proper quality and quantity. When the materials go into use they are continually inspected during the progress of the work.

There is therefore an inspection department. Engineers have learned that it is not the price of materials that counts but the quality. As quality goes up quantity goes down and price goes up but not as fast as quality. Although steel wire is dear and cast iron is cheap, we build bridges out of steel wire. Although we can buy carbon steel for $0.14 a pound, we pay $0.60 a pound for high speed alloy steel because it works faster and so much more powerfully that it would be cheap at $800 a pound if we could not get it for less.

As to complex modern materials we need therefore an engineering department to design and specify, a testing department to test and analyze, a purchasing department to buy at the best price and on the best terms, an inspection department to watch results from day to day, hour to hour; a storekeeping department to hold and to conserve, to issue carefully and economically.

Modern personal service is more complex than modern materials. How can we afford to omit as to personal service any of the safeguards found necessary as to materials? These necessary safeguards we apply through a very highly organized employment department directed and managed by specialists of the higher class and a corps of assistants.

In the employment department all these methods so necessary as to materials, we apply also to personal service control, whether we are securing a factory superintendent or a shoveler of sand. First of all an organization is outlined. It is evident that to perform certain kinds of tasks there is only one best organization. Battleships are a modern development, they have been slowly evolved. America started it when the Confederate Government sheathed the Merrimac with railroad rails and sank all the wooden ships. As the London Times editorially said, “The Merrimac made all the navies of the world obsolete.” Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, have helped develop battleships, but the organization controlling every battleship in the world, whether Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Chilean or American, is substantially the same. An American officer could be transferred to a foreign navy and find himself at once. Naval organizations the world over are interchangeable. The ordinary manufacturing concern has no standardized organization, it has generally grown like Topsy. Positions are ill defined and generally worse manned. The first duty, therefore, of a modern employment department is to outline the organization, the one best organization for the business in hand.

Its second duty is to specify the essential and required qualities for each position.

There are three different ways of filling positions:

1. To have on one’s hands some incubus, a king’s son or a king’s mistress or some political henchman, and to create a position for the incubus to fill, “duke of this” or “countess of that,” or a fat contract on city work. In England this is called “finding a berth for a friend”—_a berth—a place in which to fall asleep_.

2. The second way, and the more usual one, is to see a real vacancy and to shove a friend into it, hoping he will make it a go. The man and the job stand as good a show of fitting each other as a man would of getting the right clothes by drawing a suit in a raffle. It was Roosevelt who saw a vacancy in the Presidency, grabbed Mr. Taft, shoved him into the place, and now declares he does not fit. Personal liking is not the proper basis for a Presidential preference.

3. The third way to fill a definite vacancy is to find the man fitted for the place, and, after test, put him into it, even as we find a suitable wire for a bridge and put it in.

If we have a locomotive of definite design and we need an exhaust nozzle, there is only one design of nozzle that will answer. So if in the organization there is a position to fill, the best man for that position must have certain qualities and not have others, not every man, not the convenient man in ten, probably not one man in ten thousand is the man for the place. The employment department seeks diligently for the right man, the man who combines experience with aptitude. If it had to choose it would prefer the man without experience but with all the aptitudes to the man of experience without aptitudes. The man with aptitudes can learn quickly, reliably and fast; the man without aptitudes can never be anything but a misfit. Therefore the employment department having secured a number of prospects, carefully tests the most promising.

The old-fashioned plan is to ask a few questions, secure a few recommendations, take a look at the man, and if a hunch is felt that he will do, accept him. I know all about this plan, for I have tried it for twenty years, and in some years it has cost me $50,000. The plan does not work. I received the best set of recommendations I ever saw about a sea captain, and when we entrusted him with a $140,000 steamer he deliberately wrecked her in order to make some graft out of the repair bills.

That the man was a scoundrel was written in large type all over his face, but in those days I could not read plain print and I was better fitted, and that was _not at all_, to navigate the steamer than to select a captain.

When I taught in college I got an inkling of the right way. I taught German, and at the beginning of the year my classes were filled up with sixty students, and at the end of the year there were only twenty left. I worked on the theory that there was no profit to any one in making a bluff at studying German. It was either worth while or it was not. If worth while, learn German; if not worth while, don’t waste time on it. So I weeded and weeded my German garden until only those were left who could really learn. They learned to know German as well as they knew English. The weeding process was hard on me and hard on the misfits, hard on the good students. I gave an immense amount of rough effort to no purpose in an absolutely useless attempt to make silk purses out of sows’ ears. Then sows’ ears might have made good mince meat, but the carving and slashing I gave them hurt them to no purpose. My time was taken up on rough work until the misfits and the good students failed to receive the specially skilled attention and help their progress required. After a couple of years of this I tried a new plan. It was evident that any students who did not know English, English grammar, English spelling, English pronunciation, were not fit to study German, so I examined all applicants as to English, but I gave those who failed a week’s test, lest some genius should by chance be overlooked. I never found the genius. Under this plan I started out with a class of twenty-five instead of sixty. I gave my time to those who could profitably make use of it, and not to those who could not, and every one of the twenty-five learned German.

A man or woman can be tested in five minutes for fundamental aptitudes and traits of character as easily and reliably as I tested the prospective German pupils. It would take one too far to go into the whole subject of character analysis. A great composer like Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, can originate music, but there are thousands who can learn to play it well. So with character analysis. It requires a special and rare gift to uncover the lessons written in the coloring, in the texture, in the shape of head, in the expression of the face, of the body, of the hands, in the clothes, in the personal tricks of habit, to cross-check these tests by others as the answers to test questions, but this knowledge has been so formulated that all can learn. So instead of trying to play bumbly puppy by ourselves, of missing the accumulated researches that have been going on all over the world, of repeating all the mistakes that others have made, we do as the Japanese did when they adopted the British navy, the German army and the American schools as models. We are advised as to our employment department by a specialist of the highest skill in character analysis, in all problems relating to the handling of people. The tests are rapid but they are many and they interlock so far as to be conclusive. A man can lie with his eyes or with his lips or with his body, but no man is skillful enough to lie at the same time with eyes and lips and hands and body.

After men have been tested they are employed, not before, and they are only employed because they have the qualities that fit them for a particular place. They may be at the time only 30 p. c. men, they may be succeeding an 80 p. c. man, but the great fact is that the 30 p. c. man can and will become a 100 p. c. or a 110 p. c. man, while the 80 p. c. man is perhaps in reality an overstrained 70 p. c. man. Starting with the best of human material years are not lost gradually collecting it. Not only are the unfit excluded, but what is very much more important, the _fit are rescued_, they are given opportunity, they jump at once into the places they can fill instead of waiting for years.

What is the unnecessary cost to a business of a 30 p. c. man compared to a 100 p. c. man?

The hourly costs of a man are: His hourly wage, the hourly machine charge, the hourly overhead charge. These three items will easily average $0.70 an hour in a machine shop. If the man works at full efficiency he gives us in a year 2,700 hours of standard work in 2,700 hours of actual time at a total cost of $1,890. At 30 p. c. efficiency, it will take 9,000 actual hours, costing $6,300 to deliver 2,700 hours of standard work. The added expense due to inefficiency is $4,410 for a single worker.

Efficiency does not mean strenuousness. The fluttering rooster is strenuous, but he makes little progress; the eagle flies efficiently, covering miles of country, yet never moving a wing. The Chinese coolie on his river treadmill is so strenuous that he wears himself out in a few years. As a producer of power he costs $1,300 a year for the horse-power hour you can buy from Niagara for twenty dollars. The chauffeur of an American automobile gliding along at forty miles an hour, carrying six passengers, is efficient, not strenuous.

It is evident that under this modern employment plan the rate of wages per hour ceases to be a critical question. The efficient man, like steel wire and high-speed steel, is always worth more than he would think of asking for his services.

The requisition calls for a man with certain qualities—it never calls for a man at $0.20 or at $0.30 or at any other rate per hour. Fixed rates per hour are obsolescent when one man turns out the work for $6,300 and the other man turns it out for $1,890. For $1,890? No, he does not. We do not ask him to; we can not secure and hold any 100 p. c. man for the wage rate in the $1,890. We pay the man more, we gladly pay him more, we pay him as much as we must to secure him, but he is cheap at almost any price.

The man who receives a salary of $60,000 a year is expected to profit his company to the extent of $6,000,000 a year; the man who works for a dollar a day is always a loss, a severe loss, and, therefore, we try to eliminate him by the substitution of a machine. The fight against a machine is to carry on a losing fight against the whole current of the age. To put the worker in a position for which his aptitudes qualify him is to double, treble his value, and everybody is best fitted for something. A group of children were playing automobile; one was the engine, another the chauffeur, others the passengers. A little tot far behind was hurrying along. What are you doing? I am playing automobile. What part are you? I am the smell. In a watch there is not a useless piece. In a perfected organization there is not a useless man; there cannot be an unqualified man without endangering the whole. As I write, 20,000 mill hands are rioting at Lawrence, Massachusetts, because somebody has blundered, because some position had been badly filled.

The wage question is ethical. The workman is worthy of his hire, but also man does not live by bread alone. The man scientifically selected is 100 per cent. efficient because he likes his work, is fitted for it and it likes him; it is no longer a drudgery, it is a pleasure. We are rescuing the fit for the work which by nature’s right belongs to them and under this plan there are few unfit.

In years gone by when a beef was slaughtered much of the carcass was wasted—the horns, the bones, the hair, the hoofs, the blood, the offal went to waste. Now nothing is wasted; everything has its use, and the offal we return as fertilizer to the soil is of greater perennial use than the tenderloins and sirloins which find their way to the tables of the rich.

We have in the past treated men as if they were coal, a raw product only fit to burn, or as the German soldiers pathetically called themselves, in 1870, mere cannon fodder. But mere coal contains ammonia, beautiful dyes, strange and powerful medicines, as well as heat units.

Everybody is normally good for something, and if fitted to the right place is worth more than he now is.

At Seattle a boy of 17 was excluded from the high school because he could not learn their lists of English kings or American Presidents, but that boy went out and when I met him he had grabbed the evaporative power of the sun and was propelling a boat with it on the waters of Puget Sound. He was fit, more fit in a mechanical way than any other boy I ever knew.

It is to this Rescue of the Fit that I look forward for the great uplift of American industries, the great increase in happiness and the great elimination of strife.

It is being put to a practical test in a plant employing 200 men and it is working.

This is my message to you.

President WHITE—There is nothing further on the program for this afternoon, and we will therefore adjourn until 8:00 o’clock this evening, when Dr. Wallace and Judge Lindsey will speak in Tomlinson Hall.

SIXTH SESSION.

The Congress assembled at Tomlinson Hall, at 8:00 o’clock p. m., and was called to order by President White.

President WHITE—The delegates, visitors and citizens of this city have a rare treat in store tonight in the program that has been published, and I have a rare honor in introducing the speakers. It will be a red-letter day in my life, and I know it will be in yours.

I now want to make this audience acquainted with “Uncle Henry” Wallace. I would be glad if everyone could know “Uncle Henry” as I have been fortunate enough to know him. He has been an inspiration to every young man and every farmer and all who have known him in the State of Iowa for the past twenty-five or thirty years. He loves to sit down in his office, or study—and I have been there to see how he works—answering letters that the farmers from all over the country write him, and who look to “Wallace’s Farmer” as a source of profit and information upon every subject that affects the home. He comes close to the home, close to the family, to the fireside, answering all their questions and telling them just how they should do this or that, and all in that fatherly, kindly, brotherly way, so that he is referred to by everyone who knows him as “Uncle Henry.” He is going to talk to us tonight upon “Human Efficiency,” and he will speak from a very practical standpoint, for he has had experience all along the line.

I now take pleasure in introducing to you Dr. Henry Wallace, of Des Moines, Iowa, former President of the National Conservation Congress. (Applause.)

Dr. WALLACE—Mr. President, and Members of the Congress: It might not be amiss, before entering into a discussion of the subject proper, to recall the different subjects which have from year to year engaged the attention of the Conservation Congress, and to show how the choice of the subject for each different Congress was the natural and logical result of the discussion of the preceding Congress.

The first Congress was called, and the Congress itself was organized, as a forum in which the leading men of the Nation could discuss the problems raised by the Conservation Commission, appointed by Theodore Roosevelt at the suggestion of Gifford Pinchot, then holding the position of Chief Forester in the Department of Agriculture. His position as Forester enabled him to see the terrific waste going on in the management of our forests, and the various means by which the government forests were passing into the hands of individuals, subsequently to be wasted for private gain. He saw clearly that unless our forests were conserved and managed as are the forests of all other civilized nations, soil erosion would render future forest growth impossible, would fill our rivers with silt, dry up the streams in summer and convert them into raging torrents in winter, depriving us of water for irrigation, and diminishing in value the water power, or white coal, on which future generations must largely depend for power and transportation.

A forum was greatly needed in which the questions raised by this fearless idealist—to whom the Conservation of our resources for future generations is both wife and child—could be openly and fearlessly discussed by leaders and in the hearing of the American people. When the First Conservation Congress was called to meet in Seattle in 1909, naturally the main topic for discussion was the Conservation of the forests and of the water powers, which were then fast passing into the hands of great corporations.

By this time the public conscience was aroused. The people of the United States began to see clearly that we dare not go on in the future, looting and wasting our natural resources as we had done in the past. They began to realize that the generations of the unborn had rights in the oil, the coal and other minerals in that portion of the public domain that we had not as yet recklessly thrown away, or allowed to be stolen from us under forms of or in defiance of law. So the Second Conservation Congress was called in St. Paul, in 1910, as a forum in which the leading men of the nation could thresh out the problem as to whether these resources to which the American people at present held title should be administered by a Congress chosen by the people and speaking for the people, or whether they should be administered through an act of Congress by the several States in which the Government property happened to be located.

The historian of the future alone will be able to measure the beneficial results of the fierce conflict between those who would despoil these resources for private gain and those who would conserve them for future generations. We can, however, see some of the results in the change in the policy of our national administration, in the vigilant watch now maintained by the present Secretary of the Interior; by the success which crowned the efforts of Mr. Pinchot and others who kept constant watch over bills intended, by means of concealed jokers, to break down the fixed policy of the Government; and by the veto of the President of vicious bills which, notwithstanding the utmost vigilance, were enacted by the last Congress. This watch and guard over the heritage of the unborn could not have been maintained successfully, had it not been for the white light thrown upon the problem by the Second National Conservation Congress.

I was, unexpectedly to myself, chosen President of the Conservation Congress at the close of the St. Paul meeting; and with the consent and advice of my executive committee, in making out the program for the 1911 meeting in Kansas City, fixed the attention of the American people on the necessity for the Conservation of the fertility of the soil, and the development of a better social and family life among the tillers of the soil.

The time had come for the American people to understand that the rapid and regular advance in the cost of living was due mainly to the terrific waste of the fertility of the soil, that had been going on for more than a hundred years. It was time for the farmer to learn that he was not in a position to throw stones at the lumberman who had wasted our forests, or at the mine owner who is wasting one-third of the coal in the process of mining; that he, while a sharer in the cheapness of the products of forest and mine, had himself been mining the fertility of the soil, stored for his benefit through countless ages, and selling it at the bare cost of mining; and in doing so had built up cities the world over, which must cry for bread when the fertility of his soil became exhausted.

It is too early yet to measure the full results of this Kansas City Congress. This should be noted, however, that, whether the result of the discussions of this Congress or not, the people of the United States have shown an interest in agriculture and the maintenance of soil fertility which they had never shown before. Bankers, railroad officials, capitalists are beginning to see that unless the farmer receives encouragement and efficient aid, this nation will soon cease to be a factor in supplying other nations with food, and will gradually become a consuming instead of a producing country, so far as the products of the soil are concerned. We are beginning to see that unless a more satisfactory social life is established in the open country, the increasing disparity between rural and urban population must continue and the cost of living must go on increasing, and with it increasing discontent and social disturbance.

My successor and his executive committee, with their wide experience in practical affairs, saw clearly that if we are to restore fertility to our wasted soils, if we are to do anything worth while for the Conservation of our resources of any kind or character, there must be an increase in the efficiency of the individual. They therefore wisely chose the subject of “Vital Resources” as the main center around which discussion must revolve at the present Conservation Congress.

The subject of Vital Resources opens up a very wide field for investigation and discussion. Various subjects in the group have been discussed and others will be, by specialists who have given their particular subject years of conscientious and close study. So when only last week I was urged to make this address instead of discussing a minor phase of the subject, there was nothing left for me but a general discussion of the subject of Human Efficiency.

Man, after all, is the biggest thing on this planet. The farm people are always bigger than the farm. No matter how rich by nature the farm may be, it will lose fertility if the farmer is not big enough. The first-class farmer will take an inferior piece of land and in time bring it up to his own measure. If the farmer does not fit the farm, it will in time come up to or decline to his measure. The average production of the soil is the expression of nature’s opinion of the fitness of the man who tills it for a term of years. The most severe condemnation of the American farmer is the fact that, with some of the richest soils in the world, he has so wasted its fertility that he is crying out for commercial fertilizers; while the “heathen Chinee” has farmed for at least forty centuries, and has maintained his soil fertility without the use of commercial fertilizers.

If any great business has attracted attention by its success, one always asks: Who’s the man or men behind it? The greatness of this nation is measured not by its soil, its mines, its forests, its water powers, but by the efficiency of its people. This is true of all nations. The cynical Bismark, who always cast covetous eyes on Holland, is said once to have remarked that the way to redeem Ireland was to transport the Dutch to the Emerald Isle and transport the Irish to Holland; that the Dutch would make Ireland an earthly Paradise, while the Irish would not keep up the dikes except with the help of the Germans, who would in that case soon have a seaport.

The only way by which you can restore the wasted fertility of the soil and the waste of our forests and develop properly our mineral resources; the only way in which we can as a nation take the place to which we are entitled—that of leader in the world’s trade and commerce—is by increasing to the utmost limit human efficiency, physical, mental and moral. These three are ineradicably linked together, because they are integral parts of every human being. We can not develop fine human beings physically without the development of the intellect and the soul; nor can we develop either the intellectual or the moral to the limit without taking care of the body.

If we are to have the maximum of efficiency in the man, the child must be well born, must be free from incurable diseases, mental, moral or physical. To every generation of human beings is given by an allwise Ruler the power to foreordain the character and quality of the generation to come. The coming generation is as helpless in our hands as clay in the hands of the potter. By marriage parents decree the personality of their children. By “personality” I mean the inherent tendencies—physical, mental and moral—which, when developed wisely or unwisely, make or mar the character. In that little pink lump of humanity—the pride of the father and the joy of the mother—are bound up in various combinations the incidents, passions and capacities of the parents. It is this which gives its awful sacredness and tremendous possibilities to marriage.

The State by the extent to which it discourages and represses vice and crime, by the extent to which it prevents and controls disease, by the extent to which it encourages the marriage of the fit and prevents the marriage of the unfit, foreordains the character of the next generation. I know that I am approaching ground but little trodden, in which many fear to tread, and to tread on which is by many deemed sacrilege. But if we are to be a virile nation, strong in body, in intellect and in morals, the truth must be told fearlessly; and there is no more fitting place to tell it than where the people of this Congress are making a study of our vital resources.

To put the matter with brutal frankness: The State must soon determine whether the hardened criminal shall be allowed to take an active part in foreordaining the character of future generations; whether the manifest degenerate, whether that degeneracy be the result of being badly born or of vice or crime, shall be allowed to breed degenerates; whether those afflicted with incurable and transmissible disease shall be allowed to transmit them to a helpless posterity.

In order that the State may act wisely, it is time for a most thorough and searching investigation of existing conditions, material and moral, which lead to crime; the extent to which criminal tendencies are transmissible—criminal tendencies, mark you, for crime itself is not transmissible; what proportion of our crimes are due to intemperance, and to what extent the unbalanced state of mind which makes self-control impossible, and leads to crime, is due to inheritance. It will no longer do to say as some do: that intemperance, by killing off the unbalanced and weakling, rids society of an encumbrance; nor that nameless diseases weed out of the race those unable to maintain self-control. While all this is in a certain sense true, it furnishes no argument for abating zeal in repressing these crimes against humanity. That terrible saying of Anne of Austria: “God does not pay at the end of every week, but at last He pays,” finds striking illustration in the fate that sooner or later befalls the intemperate and the impure.

On one subject there is no need of any investigation. We must either adopt such measures as will insure as far as possible that the coming generation shall be well born, or we will compel our posterity to pay the price, as we are paying it now. We stand before the world today convicted of having more murders, more suicides and far more lynchings in proportion to our population, than any other civilized nation on the face of the globe; and also with having, speaking generally, by far the most corrupt city governments. Is it not time for us to investigate and see why we thus stand condemned in the eyes of the nations, and to what extent we are breeding crime, the crime that is our disgrace? For be assured that we must in all cases pay the price, not in cold cash alone, but in blasted lives and ruined homes and a lower degree of human efficiency. If we are to be a great nation, worthy of our blood inheritance and worthy of our material resources, our children must be well-born.

If we are to secure that measure of human efficiency that will enable us to make full use of our inheritance, whether of blood or material resources, we should see to it that the coming generation is not merely well born, but well fed. The farmer is wise in that he takes special care of the young things that come on his farm. He builds a lamb creep, that the young lamb may get feed denied its dam. He sorts his pigs into convenient sizes, and shuts them out of the feeding places until the feed is properly placed, and then lets them all in at once, so that they may all have equal opportunity. He does not allow the weanling colt to take its chance with the selfish and unprincipled horses in the stalk field. He protects his colts and gives them food “convenient” for them. If an unruly beast in his stock yard tyrannizes the young and robs them of their food, he does the sensible thing. He dehorns the unruly. He will tolerate no oppression about his farm. In this he is wise; wise, because he knows that if he fails to do this, the red flag of the sheriff will sooner or later stand above his door, and the farm will be sold to some man who will handle it more wisely.

The State has a similar responsibility for taking care of the young. Whatever may be their endowment by nature, that is, by birth, they need the nurture which is necessary to bring out and develop fully the gifts of nature. The State should smite anything that stands in the way of the proper nurture or feeding of the young. If the State is to prosper, it must protect the weak against the encroachments of the strong; and of all classes, the children of the State need its protection most.

If organized capital provides so little pay for labor, that the laboring man can not properly feed his children, then the State should dehorn that organized oppressor, as the farmer dehorns the unruly bull or boss cow. No profits to the individual or the organization, even though they be members of the State, can compensate for the robbery of the children of the State. If the State on investigation finds that the money that should purchase food for the young goes into the till of the publican, then the State should smite the publican in its wrath—not the individual publican, who perhaps may feel that he is earning his bread in the only way for which he is fitted, but the system which makes it necessary for the prosperity of the producer of intoxicating liquors, to corrupt so many hundred of our youth for every thousand dollars of invested capital. (Applause.)

If we have a system existing, whether in the State or the Nation, which can thrive only on the debauchery of the young and on the robbery of the child, by taking that which should go for food to support it, then it is time that the State and the Nation should control it to a point where it can neither seduce the young or rob the child; and that point is suppression. We must do that or do worse, namely, pay the price. We are in fact paying that now. The individual who will not keep account of his expenses is in danger of bankruptcy, no matter how great his resources; and the State which refuses to count the cost of any institution or system which tends to debauch morals, and corrupt the young, is on the way to destruction. For there is no avoiding the payment of the cost, whether we keep account or not; and that cost is not merely the dollars and cents, but starved children, blasted lives, broken hearts, ruined homes, increase of poverty and an increase of criminality, which is beyond the possibility of mathematics to compute. The State can afford to tolerate nothing whatever that stands in the way of proper nurture of the young; nor can it safely endure anything which tends to dwarf them physically, mentally or morally. (Applause.)

The State, however, will always succeed best by removing the causes that lead to improper nurture, or to the formation of vicious or criminal habits. The State can not endure poverty, grinding poverty, among any class of its people; nor can it endure having its children poorly housed. The slum is the enemy of the State and of every citizen of the State. The vice and crime of the slum reach out to the west end or the east end or the avenue, or wherever the wealthy and prosperous congregate, thus saying to all men: We are brothers. The poverty-stricken may well say: If you will not give us our rights, if you grind our faces, we will not merely levy toll on your pocketbooks, but we will infect you with our vices.

If we are to have the highest efficiency in the next generation, the State (and by the State I mean the government, whether State or National) must see to it that infancy is protected from the abominations of soothing syrup, and “sleep-easy,” that usurp the place of the catnip tea and other herbs which soothed infantile pains in the days of our grandmothers. It is useless to expect efficiency, if we pour into the innocent lips of unsuspecting childhood the habit-forming drugs which benumb the brain, stifle sensibility, and lay the foundation for incurable vices when the babe has grown to manhood. Let us get back to the ideals of the ancient psalmist, who, contemplating the future of the chosen people, uttered the prayer that “our sons shall be as plants grown up in their youth, and our daughters as cornerstones fashioned after the similitude of a palace.” That is, a plant carefully cultivated, spreading freely, its roots drawing sustenance from the soil beneath, its leaves drawing sustenance from the air and sunshine, bracing itself against the storm; the daughters the cornerstones of the home, with all the adornment that we bestow on a palace fit for the abode of royalty. Let us go back to this ancient ideal, if we are to be a happy people, whose God is Jehovah.

If we are to maintain human efficiency, the State must lay a heavy hand on the venders of impure food. After what Dr. Wiley has told you, there is no need for me to enlarge on this cause of inefficiency. Suffice it to say, there was a time in the memory of some of the older men, when there was no pure food question. Our oatmeal, our cornmeal, our flour came from our own farms. There was no shorts in our buckwheat, no white earth in our flour. If our meats were tainted, it was due to our own negligence. In these latter days we have become by force of circumstances more completely “members one of another,” drawing our food from all parts of the habitable earth; and hence the State must protect us from imposition. If we are to reap the benefits which come from the modern system of division of labor, we must not quibble about the expense involved in enforcing honesty in those who feed us.

If we are to have efficiency in the generation now entering upon the stage, or in the one to follow, we will need to make radical changes in our system of education. No matter what the natural endowment, it will be comparatively inefficient unless properly developed. Education does not consist of putting in but of drawing out. Culture is simply the proper development of the gifts of nature. All children are born with the capacity for doing, and doing well, some small part of the work that needs to be done in this great world of ours. This capacity is usually indicated by a strong preference for that kind of work. The capacity for doing is largely a matter of inheritance, and education is simply the development of this capacity. No education which fails to develop what is in the child is worth having; but no matter what may be the natural endowment, the capacity to govern in State or Nation, or to build a road, or to plow a straight furrow, or polish a pin, every child must have put into his possession the tools by which he can secure that education which will fit him for his life work. He must know how to read, that he may be in touch with his fellow-man. He must know how to write, that he may communicate his thoughts to other men. He must know how to reason, that he may put this and that together and draw conclusions. These lie at the foundation of all education.

Some education is acquired in mastering the “Three R’s,” namely, the power to observe—to see things—to tell what is seen and to draw conclusions; but the “Three R’s” are, however, merely the tools by which we ourselves afterwards acquire an education. In spite of all the money we spend on rural education (in my State from 42 to 50 per cent. of all rural taxes), our children neither read well nor write well nor reason well. How can they when our rural schools average twelve pupils, most of them less than ten, and often five, three, or only two or one pupil, and are taught mainly by persons themselves but poorly educated, and who are teaching simply to acquire the experience necessary to secure a position in a city school. Neither the reading nor the writing nor the arithmetic of these schools has any connection with the farm nor any relation to farm life, nor is the teacher as a rule in sympathy with that life. Yet this is all the education that 90 per cent. of the farmborn will ever receive.