Chapter II: Part 2

President WALLACE—On behalf of the Commercial Club of this city an address of welcome will be delivered by Mr. John C. Lester, its honored president.

Mr. Lester spoke as follows:

Mr. President and Members of the National Conservation Congress: I bear to you the greetings of the Commercial Club and the other industrial and civic organizations of Kansas City. We find nothing in our annals which is a greater source of pride than our part in bringing this Congress to Kansas City. We are proud to welcome an assembly of men and women who are devoted to the idea of the salvation of the physical resources of the nation, which means the physical salvation of our part of the race. The moral benefit to ourselves of trying to do something for others, is taught in an age-old lesson. What better way of illustrating that principle, and securing that good than by teaching that the spendthrift energies of this generation must be curbed in order that more be left for the vital sustenance of the next. What more inspiring sight than this great audience, drawn from the four quarters of the Nation with minds intent on that one principle? We easily recognize the great impulses and movements for the good of the race. They stand out in history like mile-stones. Among them the cause of your meeting, the cause of conservation is a pillar of fire. You are rightfully appalled by waste and are fighting it as sin. You are fully conscious from the story of life on this earth, of what a proper use of his resources means to man. You are fully conscious of the folly of destroying today what will be needed to save life tomorrow.

Your theme is Conservation. You tremble at conditions and seek a remedy. To you the glory of the harvest, the wealth of the mine, the roar of the falling water, the shadows of the forests, the flow of the streams, means more than the happiness of today: you would also have them the joy of tomorrow. If the world heeds your advice the day of the last man will be put off for countless ages.

The products of the soil and the forest, in seeking a market, seek the sea and its highways as naturally as do the waters of the streams. In obedience to this law, this community is now engaged in an effort to solve one of the great practical problems of conservation—that is, the conservation of power in transportation. We are devoted to the idea of the practical use of the Missouri River as a freight carrier. You have taught us that saving coal means saving life. You have also taught us that the same power required to move 8 tons on steel rails will move 34 tons on water; hence who dares say that our ambition to reach the sea by water with our products is an idle dream, or that the immutable laws of Nature are not on our side? Our critics are fighting the eternal verities! They might as well fulminate against the law of gravitation! The Missouri River is and will be navigated. In this effort we claim kinship with all the sons and daughters of Conservation.

As that eminent Frenchman and conservator of peace, Baron Destournelles, recently our guest, in writing a short time ago about this city and its relation to the Missouri River, pointed out, the river and the railroads have their separate burdens to bear, one class of freight will always seek the quicker transit of the rails, another class will always seek the vastly cheaper transportation afforded by a water channel.

But I must not anticipate a possible subject of your deliberations. Pardon me, if I feel impelled when addressing conservationists to prove a strong local bond of sympathy!

As apostles of conversation-conservation, you, at your third annual meeting, have made a splendid beginning. You have supported precept by example in that you have selected a place for your Congress, just 125 miles east of the geographical center of the United States. You have thus conserved both the time and money of your members in meeting at Kansas City!—a most excellent centre from which easily radiate all influences for good, either moral or commercial!

It is my part, however, on behalf of all our civic organizations, to supplement and, if possible, strengthen your official welcome. You are thrice welcomed; first, because we are proud to honor as great a nucleus of brains and character as ever assembled under Convention Hall; second, because we know your purpose and your work and believe in them; and, third, because we expect to learn from you how to conserve the health of our children, how to conserve the purity of the streams from which we must drink, how to conserve the fertility of our soil from the exhausting wastes of ignorance, how to conserve the happiness of the country home, and turn the tide back from the cities—all save this one perhaps—and in all things to live in and enjoy this world so that the generations that come after will bless us and the great doctrines of conservation.

We are honored by your presence.

May we all follow the banner bearing your motto, “The greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time.”

President WALLACE—An address of welcome will now be delivered by the Honorable Herbert S. Hadley, Governor of Missouri, on behalf of that great state. Governor Hadley. (Applause)

Governor HADLEY—Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: His Honor, the Mayor, and the President of the Commercial Club have made welcoming on my part a work of supererogation. I know, of course, that you are welcome, and you know are welcome, or you would not be here. The President of the Commercial Club has referred to you and to himself as apostles of conversation as well as apostles of Conservation. And so it is upon that suggestion, I suppose, that in making speeches of welcome, we are making speeches in discussion of the subject that has brought them here. I take it, however, the explanation of my presence on the program this morning, is not for the purpose of welcoming you here to the State of Missouri, because you were welcomed here when you decided to come. I am here among these apostles of conservation and apostles of conversation simply for the purpose of giving a little variety to the program. It seemed well to those who were managing this Congress that on an occasion when the people gathered together from all the states in the Union to consider the important question of a proper conservation of the soil, that it would be well to have at least one farmer among those who were gathered together for the purposes of that discussion. (Applause) And so they came down to Jefferson City to ask me to turn aside from my executive and agricultural pursuits long enough to come up here and lend a little variety to the program this morning, because to those who come from other states it may be necessary to impart that although I have been regarded and referred to upon various occasions as something of a political curiosity, I am far more than that in that I am the first farmer Governor of the State of Missouri in over a half a century, and I think the first Governor in the entire history of the state who became a farmer after he became Governor. (Laughter and applause). So consequently I represent in and of myself both the principles of conversation and the principles of Conservation. Consequently, what I have to say to you this morning will be along the line of congratulation that you have come to a state that has such a splendid example, not only of the necessity, but of the practical results of the application of that great national policy that you are gathered here to consider. As has been suggested by the remarks of the Mayor, and the President of the Commercial Club, this question of conservation is a question which has so many sides, and has so many practical and important applications that you have, Mr. Chairman, to come to a great state like the State of Missouri, with its diversified interests and resources, in order to see just exactly how great a question you are dealing with. (Laughter) So I congratulate you upon the wisdom that you have displayed in selecting your place of meeting. I say this advisedly, because Missouri, which is the oldest of those states lying wholly west of the Mississippi to have been admitted to the Union, is one of the youngest or most undeveloped states between the Mississippi and the Pacific.

Even before the territory where we meet today had become a part of the American Republic, the hardy pioneers, hunters, trappers and traders who had carried English civilization across the Alleghanies and into the valley of the Mississippi had pushed westward even to the banks of the Missouri. Following the acquisition of the Territory of Louisiana and our organization as a territory and admission as a state, Missouri stood for forty years as an outpost of civilization, reaching out to the unknown and the undiscovered West. And from her borders stretched those two great highways of commerce, the Oregon Trail, and the Santa Fe Trail, along which, in turn, were to march the soldiers, hunters, trappers and traders who were to bind the Trans-Mississippi country to the United States by ties stronger than those of treaties and of laws. The Missourian became the pioneer of the West. And in practically every state that lies in that vast empire between the Mississippi and the Pacific the sons of Missouri have felled the forests, dug the mines, cultivated the soil, written the constitutions and laws, held the offices and directed the commercial and industrial activities.

MISSOURI’S UNDEVELOPED RESOURCES.

So bounteously, in fact, has Missouri contributed of her citizenship to the development of other states and territories that she has left undeveloped many of her own natural resources and uncultivated almost one-half of her soil. Of the 44 millions of acres which constitute the State of Missouri, little more than one-half has ever been touched by a plowshare; and of her 20 millions of acres of uncultivated soil, there are 17,500,000 acres of woodland awaiting the stroke of the woodman’s axe. Of lead and zinc, we produce more than any state in the Union, yes, more than all of the states of the Union combined, or any nation in the world. And yet the geologists tell us that greater stores of mineral wealth lie beneath the surface of our soil than have even been discovered by the drill of the miner or the pick of the prospector. We have within and along our borders 6,000 miles of navigable rivers, a larger number of miles of navigable waterways than any inland state in the Union. By the cultivation of one-half of our 44 millions of acres we produce over 100 million dollars worth of corn each year, nearly 1 million dollars in value of this product for every county in the state. Missouri lies in the very center of the American corn belt, and there are no corn lands superior to those found in this state. One farmer in Missouri grows more corn each year on his farm than is grown in the nine States of Utah, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Rhode Island, Wyoming and Nevada combined. Three counties in Missouri grow more corn than nineteen other states, in which is included all of New England. These three counties grow more corn than do the states of New York, Maryland or West Virginia. Three times as much corn is produced in Missouri each year as is produced in all of South America, three-fifths as much as in all of Europe and nearly one-half as much as is produced in the whole world outside of the United States. The average yield of corn in Missouri per acre is forty bushels, a higher average yield than in any state in the Union, and yet by the proper application of the principle of conservation in the use and cultivation of the soil, this production could doubtless be increased 25 per cent. And by the proper use of the uncultivated corn lands of the state, our production could be made greater than any state in the United States, and probably greater than the entire corn production of Europe.

The same thing is true as to our other important crops. Our average wheat crop sells for 30 millions of dollars, which is also the average value of our crop of hay which is sold upon the markets, not including the immense acreage of blue grass, clover and timothy pastures.

THE OZARK REGION.

The character of our soil, as well as of our climate, is peculiarly favorable for the growing of grass. Grass is not only the greatest of all agricultural products, but its production under most favorable conditions is an indication of the most desirable place of habitation for man. One of the early travelers who investigated the conditions in the Trans-Mississippi country, who was also much of a philosopher, made the statement that the best place for human habitation is in that country farthest south where grass grows well. And the country farthest south where grass grows well is to be found in the Ozark region of Missouri. When the first Spanish explorers crossed the Mississippi, they found the largest herds of buffalo, elk, deer and antelope feeding upon the splendid pastures of blue stem and of blue grass in what is now the southern half of Missouri. Prior to the coming of the white man, this region was a vast upland prairie, noted for its splendid growth of grass and favorable hunting ground. And so long as the Indians remained, the growth of trees, except along the rivers and the streams, was prevented by the burning of the grass each year. But with the coming of the white man and the driving out of the Indian, the growth of the timber extended back from the rivers and the streams, and what was once the greatest pasture in the country is now covered by a growth of timber.

Through the proper application of the principles of conservation, this timber can be cleared in such a manner as to restore the growth of blue grass and of blue stem to make this region the most favorable for dairying and the raising of live stock that the country affords, and at the same time preserve enough of the trees to give the natural commercial advantages to be derived therefrom.

Of our 20 millions of acres of uncultivated soil, three and one-half million consist of swamp and overflowed lands to be found in the valleys of our great rivers. If this land were reclaimed by the application of the principles of conservation, so as to produce a certain annual harvest, it would produce enough of agricultural wealth each year to feed all of the people of Missouri, and leave the balance of our 23 millions of acres for the production of surplus products.

In support of this statement, let me refer you to facts of history, for Egypt, during the palmiest days of her civilization, never had under cultivation to exceed six millions of acres in the Valley of the Nile. And yet these six millions of acres supported a population of 10 millions of people. Holland reclaimed from the sea two and one-half millions of acres of land which supported a population of 8 millions of people. And yet the swamp and flooded lands of Missouri are as rich as the reclaimed lands of Holland or the Valley of the Nile.

THE NEED OF SWAMP LAND RECLAMATION.

The reason why these lands do not now produce a certain annual harvest is largely due to the fact that the National Government does not keep within their banks the waters of its navigable rivers. During the course of the last ten years, the National Government has spent 125 millions of dollars to put water on to three and one-half millions of arid lands in the West. I am confident that there is no one present here today who objects to the policy that has been followed by our National Government for the reclamation of the arid lands of the West by the conservation of our waters for the purpose of irrigation. Though mistakes may have been made in isolated cases, the general policy meets with national approval. But I feel that the time will come; in fact, I believe it has come, when the national government should be willing to spend at least a small portion of the money that it uses to put water on the arid lands of the West to keep the water of its navigable rivers off of the rich lowlands of the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers. It takes an expense of from $25 to $40 an acre to put water on to the arid lands of the West, and yet it is the estimate of engineers that by an expense of not to exceed $5.00 an acre the water of the navigable rivers can be kept off of the lowlands adjacent thereto.

This question is of importance not only to the people of Missouri, but to the people of the entire country. There are in the Mississippi and Missouri river valleys over 20 millions of acres of the richest lands in the world, which are now impaired for the purpose of cultivation by reason of swamps and overflows. If this land were reclaimed and made to yield a certain annual harvest, it would almost double the agricultural production of the Mississippi Valley. And the reason why it is not so productive is, as I have said, because the national government does not keep the waters of its navigable rivers within their banks. By doing so the reclamation of this swamp and flooded land would not only be made possible, but by such a policy our navigable rivers would be improved and made more dependable as a means of inland transportation. And it little profits us to increase the production of our fertile fields unless that production can be carried from the farms to the market in such a way and for such a charge as will adequately compensate for the labor thereby expended.

And if the principles of conservation were given a practical and effective application in improving our rivers by the keeping of their waters within their banks, by using in a proper and a scientific way our uncultivated soil, the railroads would be unequal to the task of carrying such an immensely increased agricultural production from the farm to the market. Then the question of water transportation would become a necessity and, in my judgment, a satisfactory progress in the improvement of our inland waterways for the purposes of transportation will not be made until our agricultural production is increased to such an extent that existing railroads are unequal to its transportation.

THE PROBLEM OF ADEQUATE PRODUCTION.

I have outlined to you, in a most general way, some of the important phases of the question of conservation which find a practical application to the conditions existing today in the State of Missouri. Experts tell us that over 40 per cent of our farm lands are being cultivated in a way which tends to decrease, rather than to increase, their productivity. Such a policy must inevitably result in the impoverishment of the Nation; because when you destroy the productivity of the soil, then do you strike at the very foundation of national prosperity and happiness. Agriculture, the oldest of occupations, is clearly the most important. The value of that which is produced from the soil exceeds the value of all other products of human labor. Up to the present time in this country, we have been peculiarly fortunate in that our production has exceeded consumption and the supply has always been greater than the demand. The result has been that the American people alone, of all the people of the world, have eaten the same kind of food. And no stronger influence could exist as against the creation of classes and castes in our population than for all of the people to eat the same kind of food.

But with the consumption increasing more rapidly than production, and the consequent increase in the cost of the necessities of life, there shall come a time when many will not be able to secure the same kind of food that is enjoyed by others. Then will there come a disturbing and dangerous influence which will threaten our society and our institutions. Statistics tell us of a constantly decreasing surplus of production. Our balance of trade is rapidly becoming confined to the exports of cotton. And if the present tendency continues, in a few years we will consume all of the products of our grain and of our live stock and have none to sell in other lands. And when this condition is followed by a time that it will be necessary to import the necessities of life, then will exist conditions which will be the cause of concern, as well as a reflection upon the American people for their capacity to use in a proper manner the great natural resources with which nature has endowed them.

I feel, however, that the American people have demonstrated most impressively their capacity for self-government by the effective manner in which they have taken up this important question of conservation. Ten years ago, the term was hardly known outside of the laboratory of the scientist and the class-room of the agricultural college. Today it is almost a household term. Under the inspiring leadership of that great American, Theodore Roosevelt, the American people have taken up the consideration and the practical application of this important national policy. And this splendid Congress today, assembled in this progressive and developing city, is an evidence of the fact that the interest in this question is by no means subsiding.

I welcome you to Missouri and voice the sentiment of her people when I say we hope that your deliberations and discussions will contribute to the practical and effective application of that great public policy that you are gathered here to consider.

President WALLACE—This is a right good looking audience. We want it to go down in history, and if you will just be quiet, we will have a flashlight picture taken before I respond to this eloquent address to which you have just listened.

[After the flash light picture was taken the Congress proceeded.]

President WALLACE—I assure you that it is a great privilege as well as pleasure to respond in behalf of this Congress to the cordial address of welcome of the Governor of the great State of Missouri, the Mayor of Kansas City and the President of the Commercial Club. The people of the West generally know Kansas City only as they see it from the stations, and have no proper conception of the magnificence of its buildings, the beauty of its streets and surroundings, and still less of the remarkable enterprise of its citizens. I confess that all this was a great surprise to me on a recent visit here.

The real greatness of your city lies in the agricultural resources. With the great State of Kansas on the west, with the great State of Missouri on the east, with Oklahoma and Arkansas with their undeveloped resources on the south, its future greatness must be largely measured by the development of agriculture in these great states, in the great corn state lying farther north and in the great cotton states farther south. Kansas City can lay its hand on more possible agricultural wealth than any other city on the map of the United States. Hence it was early recognized by the officers of this Congress as the best possible place to inaugurate a campaign for better farming, better business and better living on the farm.

The actual prosperity of any city is largely measured by the foresight, the breadth of vision and energy of its commercial club. A modern city may have vast resources; it may have a form of government almost ideal; and that government may be acceptable to the people and free from any breath of scandal; but if it does not have an organization of its ablest and best business men, who can make a careful study of these resources, who work together—and that, too, often at great personal and pecuniary sacrifice—for the good of the city as a whole, these resources are likely to remain undeveloped. The citizens of your city and the whole state may well be proud of your Commercial Club. Its members are the eyes through which the citizen sees the possible, and the hands through which the possible becomes the actual. They are the ears that recognize the unspoken needs and aspirations of the busy masses, and the voice that gives them authoritative expression. Without an active Commercial Club, such as you have, in which the masses of the city have perfect confidence, you could not realize your possibilities.

I am no less glad to respond to the cordial greeting of the Governor of Missouri, a state of magnificent resources of soil, in mineral wealth of several kinds, and in climate. As “no man liveth to himself,” no state liveth to itself; but Missouri could better afford to be fenced off by itself than any other state in the Union. It could feed itself, clothe itself and enjoy itself, and all from its own resources in field, forest and mine, “without the aid or consent of any other nation on the face of the earth.” Its Governor and its citizens may well be proud of its advance in educational lines and in the development of its many and varied resources. Kansas City, Missouri, is therefore a fitting place for the conservationists of the United States to meet and discuss the greatest of all present problems; how to conserve the greatest of the resources of the Nation, the fertility of the soil and the life of the people who live in the open country. I am sure I voice the sentiment of this Congress as a whole when I return its most heartfelt thanks and full appreciation of the hearty welcome given by the Mayor of Kansas City, the President of its Commercial Club, and the Governor of the State of Missouri.

THE DRIFT OF POPULATION.

It will be my object in this address not to discuss any phase of the conservation movement exhaustively, but to outline briefly two drifts of population: the drift from the farm to the city and the drift from the city toward the land, and the work of this Congress as related thereto.

Even before the daily press had begun the crusade “back to the land,” the movement toward the land had already set in. When Oklahoma was opened to settlement the land seekers stood, serried ranks of horsemen, waiting for the signal gun; and that great state of undulating prairie, heretofore only a great pasture, was converted in a few weeks into a state of farm homes. Congress did not dare to repeat the experiment; but when other Indian reservations were opened, provided for the distribution of land by lot, giving the prize to the lucky man rather than to the one with the swiftest horse and most accurate knowledge of the country. Every opening since reveals the fact that only one in a few can gain the coveted prize, so great is the land hunger of the American people.

This land hunger is not peculiar to any class of people nor to any state. The merchant, the banker, the railroad official of New York and Boston, each longs for a farm, possibly only as a summer home, but is willing to pay for it in investment, in improvements and cost of management, more than it is worth in dollars or ever will be. He, too, is bitten by land hunger. Many small business men of our cities, who cannot hope to secure a farm and live on it, invest greedily in acreage in the suburbs. The workman in the factory aims to secure two or three acres on which he can build himself a home, have a garden or cow pasture or place for poultry, or at least a playground for his children.

The growth of large cities has ceased to be in the business or even in the old residence sections, and is entirely in the suburbs. The same holds true abroad. According to the census for 1909, London in the ten years previous increased about three-quarters of a million. Yet the population of the old town, “Old Londontown,” decreased very heavily; the administrative district just outside that did not quite hold its own; and the entire growth and twenty thousand more was made in the outer circle or the suburbs. If men cannot have country life in the country, they are constantly aiming at “_rus in urbe_,” in other words, to get as much as possible of the country in the city.

As interurbans stretch out from the cities, farm after farm on their lines is divided up into acreage; and thus while the steam railroads tend to concentrate population, as they have from the beginning, the trolley lines tend to lure the people back toward the country. Even our foreign population, the men who dig our coal, mine our ores and swelter in our furnaces, aim to have a few acres which they can call their own, where they may live cheaply and die in peace and quiet, when the great interests have used up their best days and cast them off.

In fact, latent in the heart of nearly every man, be he man of business, clerk or other employe, or laboring with his hands, there is a yearning desire to have a piece of land to call his own. Perhaps they do not consciously reason it out. It may be a revival of the instinct of the primitive man, or it may be an instinctive fear of industrial wrath to come and a feeling that, should it come, should our whole industrial system be shaken to its very foundation, the family that has a few acres of its own can at least live in comparative comfort and safety.

THE MOVEMENT TO THE CITY.

Alongside of this movement, back toward, if not always to the farm, the counter-movement from the farm to the town, which has been going on for fifty years, continues with increasing and accelerated force. Farmers all over the older West move in great numbers or retire to the country towns; and notwithstanding all this constant influx of population, these towns, as the late census reveals, have barely held their own and often have lost population, the natural increase of the towns themselves pouring into the larger towns and cities, in which the majority live with less comfort than the farmers who remain on their farms. Vast numbers of boys and girls fall a prey to the alluring vices of the city; and many of them eventually take their places with “the down and out.” Comparatively few succeed and become well-to-do. The children of these few become wealthy; their grandchildren usually spend gaily the fortunes they never earned; and naturally the family dies out, at least, so far as force and power are concerned, in another generation or at most two or three. The city uses up men and families as it uses up horses. And this is true not only in this, but in the older countries as well. All Ireland, for example, except Dublin and Belfast, has lost population in the last ten years, as has also nearly all of Wales and Scotland.

I regard it as important that you should understand as clearly as possible the conditions that have caused this world-wide movement from the farm to the city, as only in this way shall we be able to foresee and describe the conditions that will cause and are even now causing a return flow or movement back toward the land.

This movement townward began with the use of improved machinery, or the application of science to the operations of manufacturing and distributing the things necessary for the supply of our ever-increasing human wants. It has increased in proportion to the success of the inventions and discoveries. The power loom put all other looms out of business. The spinning jenny sent the spinning wheel to the attic. The small industries—the wagon shops, the blacksmith shops, the grist mills and carding mills found in and around the county seats and smaller towns fifty years ago—“folded their tents like the Arab and silently stole away,” when it was found that a large plant and improved machinery, coupled with transportation facilities, could supply human wants at less cost.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CORPORATION.

What followed? Large capital was required for the larger plants. The individual gave place to the firm; the firm eventually became a corporation, and finally a trust. At last the workman could no longer own his own tools, and became an employe. Large numbers of employes were soon necessary, and for self-protection they formed the union. The organization of labor followed logically the organization of capital and gave us one of the greatest and most difficult of modern problems, that of labor unions.

In the factory we no longer aim to supply local demands, but state, interstate, national and even international. For this there must be transportation, and therefore we have now a railroad problem closely intertwined with the labor problem, intimately connected with the whole process of manufacturing and distribution. The products of these great factories must be used by consumers living at long distances. Hence we have the problem of distribution, or the problem of the middleman, and all the direct results of the application of science to industry. Since the world began the like has never been seen before. We have gone into this troubled sea without chart or compass. Problems are evolved, for the solution of which we have neither precedent nor guide.

While all this was going on, an empire of virgin soil, the counterpart of which exists in such mass nowhere else in the world, was opened for immediate settlement, and that settlement was powerfully stimulated by the homestead law and immense railroad grants. As a result the Old World and the New were literally sluched with food for man and beast at the bare cost of mining the soil fertility, the storage of unnumbered centuries. Had this Mississippi Valley been covered with forests like Pennsylvania and Ohio, and opened slowly as the world needed food, our history would have been written differently, and the problems to be met would have been of an entirely different character.

With corn at from 20 to 25 cents, wheat 50 cents, oats 15 cents, the manufacturer could afford to pay higher wages than the farmer and give shorter hours. The city could furnish plank walks, then cement, paved streets, light, amusement, society—the joy of living. Is it any wonder that the farm boy and girls fled to the cities, away from the old-time isolation of the farm, from bad roads, from lack of society, when offered better pay and shorter hours? Better pay; shorter hours; larger life; amusements for all, whatever their tastes might be; what boy or girl could resist all this?

THE EVOLUTION OF MACHINERY.

The farm itself finally began to use improved machinery. The farmer hung his scythe in a tree and bought a mower; hung up his cradle and bought a binder. He used more horses, better tools, and grew more crops with less than half the labor. All this was natural, logical, inevitable. The older farming sections do not have so dense a population as of old, simply because they do not need it as they did when farming under old conditions. They could not use it with profit when they had to compete with town wages and town hours.

What then followed? Inevitably, soil impoverishment. The nineteenth century farmer was, speaking generally, no farmer at all, but a miner, a soil robber. There was a good farmer here and there, a good settlement here and there; but, speaking generally, there was no farming, nothing but mining. The nineteenth century farmer sold the stored fertility of ages at the bare cost of mining it. With his gang-plow and his four to eight-section harrow, he could do more soil robbing in five years than his grandfather could do in his whole lifetime. The evidence of it: The now general use of commercial fertilizers from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which means that the farmer of today is paying good round sums for the fertility his father literally gave away; and the disappearance of crops which grow during a short season, and therefore must have fertile land. Our flax crop, for instance, is now disappearing up into Canada, spring wheat closely following, and our oats crop preparing to follow.

We are now nearing a point where we will need practically all our grains to provide for the wants of our own population. Our export of corn is merely a dribble; in our last census year 100 million bushels less than the average ten years before. Our exports of meats and dairy products have shrunk in ten years over 50 per cent. We sent abroad last year only about one-third the number of cattle we sent ten years ago. There is not the slightest indication that this decline will be checked. If checked at all, it will be but temporarily, due to an industrial crisis. Were it not for over 500 million dollars’ worth of cotton that we send abroad each year, the country would be drained of its precious metals to settle our foreign obligations, and we would be on the verge of national bankruptcy.

THE PRODUCTION PER ACRE.

Is it not amazing that, mainly since our Declaration of Independence, 135 years ago, we have been able to so waste our fertility that we produce less wheat per acre than any people of the Eastern Hemisphere, except Russia and India? Lands in England that have been farmed for more than a thousand years produce more than twice as much wheat per acre on the average as we do in the naturally better lands of the Mississippi Valley. That demonstrates the difference between farming and merely mining the soil fertility.

This condition has been greatly hastened by our statesmen. The gift of an empire of land to railroads to enable them to furnish speedy and cheap transportation for a vast continent, together with the enactment of the homestead law, so excessively stimulated agricultural production that the farmer was often, and in fact generally until about twelve years ago, forced to sell his products at and often under the cost of production. This gave the world cheaper food than it will ever see again, and made possible the wonderful growth of great cities the world over.

The anxiety of the farmer to find a home market instead of having his prices fixed in a foreign market under competition led to the continuance of the system of high tariffs long after the reason for it had ceased to exist, thus wonderfully stimulating the growth of the cities of our own land, cities which with all our boasted ability we have never been able to govern decently. When this undue stimulus is removed, as it will and must be sooner or later, our manufacturers will have to take the same medicine which sickened the farmers in the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s.

Inasmuch as there are no more Mississippi valleys to be opened, we are now nearing the turning of the lane. We must from henceforth learn how to farm. We cannot greatly increase our acreage; will, in fact, be compelled by the return of normal climatic conditions over our western territory to reduce it. The only thing left to do is to grow more grain per acre, better stock in greater numbers per quarter section. Only in this way can we reduce the cost of living.

HOW TO PRODUCE FOOD CHEAPLY.

Our great problem, as I said to this Congress a year ago, is how to produce food for our own people at prices which they can afford to pay. But how? Partly by putting more brains into our farming. There is a great deal of agricultural labor wasted simply because many farmers do not have even an elementary knowledge of the forces with which they have to work. It is hard to convince them that the fertility of the soil is not inexhaustible. Farmers of this class have been soil robbers too long, and they continue to grow the same crop year after year, trusting to luck. It is hard to get the farmers of this class to understand the philosophy of crop rotation, of the natural movement of water in the soil, or of the ideal seed-bed, or the fitness of certain soils for certain crops; in short, of the requirements of plant or animal life, or to persuade them to active coöperation with each other, or to get them in actual touch and sympathy with the new agriculture. This is an educational process, and therefore slow, even when there is a disposition to acquire the knowledge. Many farmers have more faith in moon signs than in agricultural colleges and experimental stations; more faith in ordinary politicians than in college professors and scientists; more faith in yellow journals than in the best agricultural papers.

For this reason we now grow on an average two-thirds of a pound of corn to the hill; whereas the good farmer often grows on no better land originally two pounds per hill of three stalks, and three pounds are possible. We grow fourteen bushels of wheat per acre (this year but twelve and a half), while on land no better naturally, and often not so good, England grows thirty-two and Germany twenty-eight bushels. We are now passing through a stage through which English farmers passed when they grew but twelve and a half bushels of wheat per acre. The new agriculture has lifted the English and the Danish farmer out of the rut. It will lift us when we begin to use our brains. Before this Congress adjourns we will have some illuminating discourses on this branch of the subject, addresses by men of national reputation, who have devoted their lives to some particular phase of the problem of conserving and restoring soil fertility. I would not, even if I could, anticipate what they will say and say so well.

The farmer complains that he cannot employ labor necessary to grow full crops on his land, and therefore that he cannot now engage in intensive farming. There is just ground for his complaint. The factory, the store, the railroad, the trolley line outbid him for the labor, even that which is farm born and farm bred. He cannot use the cheap labor of Southern Europe, nor the hobo or tramp, nor the ne’er-do-well of the city, because the farm with its improved machinery and its live stock requires skilled labor, and a kind of skill that can be acquired only on the farm. He can use Russian and the Japanese in the beet fields. He can use the emigrant from Southern Europe in the vegetable garden, in digging ditches or making roads; but he cannot use this labor in modern farming operations. He dare not employ an unskilled man in milking, nor in feeding his cattle, nor entrust to his care the management of either improved machinery or team.

BOYS AND GIRLS AND THE FARM.

Therefore the very root and kernel of our modern farm problem is how to retain on the farm all the boys and girls born there, who are fit to be farmers or farmers’ wives. This can be done only by making farm life worth living. Making money or owning a farm is not all of farm life. We have but one life to live on this earth, and we should get out of it all that is possible. In many sections in the country, with bad roads, poor schools, poor churches and no social life, farm life is not worth living. That proof of this is seen in the fact that farm boys and girls flee from it, and the farmer himself, as soon as he thinks he is able to live in town.

The farmer himself is to blame for much of this. He has played on the roads under pretense of working them. He has hired the school teacher at the lowest wage and starved the preacher. He has accepted the town ideal of life, regarding himself as “only a farmer.” His school has not been a rural school at all, but a poor kind of city school moved out into the country; and its teacher gaining at his expense the years of experience, while teaching farm children in terms of the town instead of the farm and in the spirit of the farm, that will enable her to get a position in the city. His preacher has been hoping he would get a call to a city church. If the farmer has got on in the world, his wife, if she is very foolish indeed, is inclined to boast that her society is not in the country, but the town. He allows the politician in the city to fix up a slate and tell him how he must vote.

All that is needed to convert the farmers of the West into peasants is to continue this policy for another generation. Fortunately this policy will not continue. All over the country there is the beginning of a great social and industrial awakening. The farmer is beginning to “magnify his office,” to cut loose from partisan bias, to do his own thinking and act for himself. He is paying better salaries to his school teachers, and insisting that the teaching have some relation to the life of the farm. He is buying his own automobiles, and paying cash for them. He is beginning to realize that farm life is essentially different from the life of the town. The man who steps high because accustomed to walking over clods and has the far away look of one who studies the clouds, is a different type of man altogether from the man who glides along the pavement and to whom the weather is a matter of little or no immediate concern. The man who glances over the headlines of his daily paper while he sips his coffee is a different character from the man who reads and studies the editorial of his weekly paper. This farmer’s wife is now organizing her own clubs and giving her town sisters lessons in club work. The movement to organize life clubs is spreading. The boys and girls are organizing for games. The country church is beginning to realize its mission, and in several states country preachers are taking short courses in agricultural colleges in order that they may teach morals and religion to farmers in terms of their daily life.

The conservation of the life of the farmer, using the word in its broadest sense, is essential to the conservation of the fertility of the soil; and for that reason the executive committee of this Congress has invited some of the leaders, men whose hearts are in this work, to discuss before you its various phases. You have a real treat before you.

In conclusion, permit me to say that the ultimate prosperity of the city, its ability to govern itself wisely and well, depend on the development of rural manhood. More than that, the very permanence of our republic will depend on the development of the manhood of the farm. Rome ceased to be a republic shortly after the farmers moved to town and left their lands to be tilled by mere hirelings and slaves.

We keep the best wine to the last always, and the last address of this morning will be a response by Hon. J. B. White, of Kansas City, chairman of the executive committee of the National Conservation Congress. Mr. White. (Applause)

Mr. WHITE—Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen of this Congress: It is not necessary that I should reply to the address of welcome, the ground has been so fully covered by the President of this Association. I feel like endorsing from my heart everything he has said, but as a matter of form, because it is expected that the chairman of the executive committee will have something to say, I want to join as a private citizen of Kansas City in welcoming the farmers and the conservationists of the entire country here today, and as the chairman of the executive committee I want to thank the good people of Kansas City for the admirable and perfect preparation that they have made. I want to thank the board of local managers. I want to thank the Secretary of the Commercial Club, Secretary Clendening, personally, and the organization of which he is the main worker. I want to thank him for the great work which they have done in making this Conservation Congress possible. The Commercial Club of Kansas City has been well spoken of as the eye and the ear of the people of Kansas City, and it is truly so.