  The Congress reconvened in the Auditorium, Saint Paul, at 2 p.m. September 7, President Baker in the chair. President Baker—Ladies and Gentlemen: I have the honor of asking Senator Moses E. Clapp, of Minnesota, to preside this afternoon, and to him I now yield the chair. (Applause) Senator Clapp—Ladies and Gentlemen: During the course of this Congress much has been said concerning the fact that Conservation applies not only to the material resources of a Nation, but to its productiveness and to its energies; and among those things to which it must under that classification apply is the Conservation of time. Now, I am going to give you a practical illustration of how a loyal adherent can carry out the Conservation of time by omitting a speech, and proceeding at once to the business of the afternoon. (Laughter) The first entry in the program for this afternoon is an address, "Making Our People Count," by Dr Edwin Boone Craighead, President of Tulane University, whom I take great pleasure in introducing. (Applause) President Craighead—Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: In this Republic there is one thing supremely great and sacred, greater than the great Republican party, the party of Lincoln and Grant, greater than the great Democratic party, the party of Jefferson and Jackson, more precious than the Conservation of our natural resources, more sacred than the Supreme Court, or even the Constitution itself—I mean the great American people (applause). To make this people count, not only in the Conservation of our natural resources but also in the enlargement and enrichment of their own lives, is the fundamental, the paramount, problem of this Republic; for ours, it must not be forgotten, is not only a Government of the people and by the people, but also preeminently a Government for the people. The Founders of this Republic were not only scholars and thinkers, but seers and prophets. With profound knowledge of the despotisms that for five thousand years had crushed and enslaved the greatest and sublimest thing on this earth, the individual man, the Fathers of the Republic laid broad and deep its foundations upon an everlasting rock—the inalienable, the ineradicable, the eternal right of man to life, The individual man, the individual woman, is by far the greatest and sublimest creation of God that we know of—far greater and grander than any or all the institutions of society. These institutions are the works of the hands of man, they exist for him, and their only reason for being is that they minister to him. Yea, the earth was made for man, and the only reason for the Conservation of its resources is that they may minister unto the needs of the individual man: In the deliberations of this Congress the words of Ruskin should be uppermost in the minds of all: "There is no real wealth but life;" and by life he meant the perfection of the entire man, body, soul, and spirit. That church is best, that institution is noblest, that civilization is highest, that country is greatest, which furnishes the most abundant life to the largest number of human beings. The Chinese Empire, which embraces near four hundred million human beings, has existed for five thousand years; yet the countless millions of China, springing up like tropical weeds and sinking back to dreamless dust, have contributed far less to civilization than the twenty thousand Athenians who in the brief Periclean age followed the footsteps of Plato and Socrates. (Applause) Neither vastness of population or territory, nor richness of natural resources, nor accumulated wealth can alone make a great country. That country is great, no matter how barren its soil, whose children may truthfully repeat the words of the stern old Spartan, who, when one pointing in derision to the bleak hills of Lacedemonia asked, "What do you grow there?" replied, "We grow men there" (applause). To breed a race of strong men and noble women is the one and only thing that can make a country truly great. Consider Scotland—a poor and barren country, yet who would dare to call poor the land of Scott and Burns and Carlyle? Who shall estimate the wealth of Scotland's contribution to the world and to America? The sons of her sturdy pioneers who poured down through Virginia and Kentucky and the Carolinas have been worth to this Republic their weight in gold. (Applause) Take Ireland, that synonym of poverty; and yet how could our great metropolitan cities thrive for a single day without the helping hand of the sons of Erin? Somebody has advised that we buy Ireland, not for her natural resources, not to grow corn and wheat and cotton, but to grow policemen. (Applause) Coming a little nearer home, take New England with her thousands of abandoned farms, rich only in the variety and ferocity of her climate and the blessed dispensations of our American protection; and yet far from mean have been New England's contributions to the Take only one other illustration: Who of you from the waving cornfields of Iowa and Illinois, from the fertile lowlands of the Mississippi, has not wondered, while passing through the Old Dominion and looking out upon her red clay hills, how on earth do these people make a living? Why give me one acre of the best Louisiana soil—and it is nearly all good—and put it down upon the barren rocks of New England, or upon the red hills of Old Virginia, and I would make a fortune selling it for fertilizer (laughter). And yet Virginia has contributed more to the wealth of the American Republic than any other single State of the Union (applause). At the call of what other States did there ever arise a larger band of more gallant men than they who under the leadership of Jackson and Lee withstood for long weary months the combined forces of the Union? And when the War was over, and Virginia found herself in abjectest poverty, she showed to the world that her riches were inexhaustible; for during the next forty years she sent abroad into other States five hundred thousand of her most adventurous sons (applause), and, in so doing, contributed more to the wealth of this Republic than all the gold that was ever dug from the mines of California (applause). I do not wonder that the poorest the humblest son of the Old Dominion, no matter where he finds himself, whether trudging through the snows of Minnesota or loitering perchance beneath the fragrant magnolias of Louisiana—even he, the poorest and humblest, must quicken his steps and lift aloft his head as he remembers, "Mine is the land of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and James Monroe and John Marshall James Russell Lowell said—and said truthfully—that countries are great only in proportion to what they do for the moral and the intellectual energy, the spiritual faith, the hope, the comfort, the happiness of mankind. (Applause) Chairman Clapp—Ladies and Gentlemen: It is provided in the program that between the set speeches we will hear briefly from the accredited representatives of the various States, taken in alphabetical order. I now have the pleasure of calling upon the State of Alabama. (Pause) If no one cares to be heard from Alabama, I now call upon Arizona. (Pause) If no one from Arizona, then from the State of Arkansaw; and that there may be no mistake on the part of the inhabitants of that State in the termination of the name, I repeat that call in the name of Arkansas. (Laughter) A Delegate—Mr Chairman, I suggest that the call of the States be deferred until 8.30 in the morning, and that it then be taken up as a definite matter of business. Chairman Clapp—Will the gentleman make a motion to that effect? [The motion was made, seconded, put and carried without dissenting voice.] President Baker—Mr Chairman: I will be very glad to be here at 8.30. We want everyone to be heard, and I would come here at 6 oclock if desired, though I think 8.30 is early enough. I will be here promptly to open the Congress and hear from the States until the regular speakers begin. Then on Thursday afternoon we have set aside a special time to hear from all the States and all the different organizations represented here. Chairman Clapp—Ladies and Gentlemen: During last summer it became my province to distribute nuggets of moral philosophy and political truth to the people of Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa; and while laboring in that moral vineyard I discovered that there was a newspaper in the Southwest that had an immense influence throughout all that section. We have a representative of that paper with us this afternoon, who will now address us on "The Press and the People"; Mr D. Austin Latchaw, of the Kansas City Star. (Applause) Mr Latchaw—Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: As a representative of the newspaper profession, before I say anything else, I wish, on behalf of my associates and myself, to thank the city of Saint Paul and its Committee on Arrangements for the very excellent facilities provided and the thoughtful courtesies extended to the men assigned to cover this Congress. The subject assigned me is incidental rather than germane to the work of this Congress. It is a big subject, and even if I felt that I could do justice to it I would doubt the appropriateness of using this occasion for the discourse. You are here to consider practical Conservation; to discuss ways and means to develop and, so far as possible, to foster the natural resources of this country, and above all to check and prevent the wasting of them. And it is one striking commentary on the relations of the press to the people that you do not need to give a moment's concern about the publication of your deliberations and conclusions. (Applause) Yet it does seem fitting that at some stage of these proceedings a little time should be given to the consideration of that far-reaching agency without which the results of this Congress would not reach the public at large; for what you do today will be made known to tens of millions of readers tomorrow. If it were not so, the value of such public-spirited meetings as this would be immeasurably discounted. However, as a member of the newspaper profession I cannot but feel that my subject would be more appropriately discussed by someone outside of that profession. It might be handled more frankly. It might be made more instructive to both the press and the people. Most assuredly I have not come here to throw stones at my professional brethren, and as for handing them bouquets, that gentle function might be performed with a somewhat better grace by someone outside the family. Still, I shall not be quite so reserved as was an old farmer back in Pennsylvania, whose farm adjoined that of my father when I was a boy, and who always got the worst of it in a horse trade because he was too modest to brag about his end of the proposition. First of all the newspapers of this country could not have the splendid field they possess, the great opportunities they enjoy and the inspiring attention they command, if they did not appeal to the best read, the most intelligent, and the most responsive people on earth. In no other country is such a large percentage of the public a newspaper-reading public. Nowhere else does the average man know so much about current affairs of all kinds as in this country of ours. On the other hand, I believe this popular intelligence is reciprocal—that the response the newspapers find for their endeavors is largely due to their efficiency in disseminating the news, in analyzing public questions, and in reiterating the truth. The man who is an habitual reader of a good newspaper owes much to that paper, just as the paper also owes much to him. It is true that newspapers differ in policies and methods and doctrines, and there are times when the public may be confused rather than enlightened by the different presentations of the same subject, especially if the subject be one of technical complexities, such, for example, as that of the protective tariff. But in the daily run of events The chief function of the press is, of course, to present the news, and the news, collectively speaking, is non-partisan. A paper's advertising is non-partisan. If it is the right sort of paper, its circulation is largely non-partisan. And with equal freedom in its editorial policy, a newspaper, especially the big resourceful paper with an efficient and somewhat specialized staff, may make of itself a sort of popular university for its readers, furnishing them with authoritative information, whether obvious in the news or elucidated in the editorials, on the current life of the world. I am not one of those who believe that a newspaper should confine itself to the mere presentation of the news. That is a great and powerful function, but the paper with a vast audience, with a reputation for honesty and authority, can make of itself a constructive agency of tremendous power (applause). Also, it can make itself a destructive agency, when the public welfare demands that something should be destroyed (applause). Of course, we are a busy people, and newspapers must be prepared with reference to our limited leisure. A few papers are conducted on the theory that the public has no time to read anything but the headlines. I am not here to "knock" this class of newspaper. If they do not show a regrettable preference for the sensational or the scandalous, they serve a good purpose in the scheme of publicity. They have greatly enlarged the newspaper audience. Do not forget that. And it is the experience of those who have published this class of papers that sooner or later their readers require more conservatism. As a result there has been a tendency for some time among these papers toward a more dignified style of publication. But, as I have said, we are busy people. We have need for intelligent digests, authoritative discussions of the subjects of the day as well as news developments of those subjects. An evidence of this need is the fact that, in some of our municipal, State, and National I will not presume to encroach upon the direct business of this Congress except so far as the newspaper hears a relation to it. Every newspaper publisher has a personal as well as his public share of the general interest in Conservation. The problem of procuring wood pulp at prices that will permit the continuation of the publication of newspapers at the present low rates will soon be serious unless a check is put upon the rapid decrease in the forest area. Wood pulp is made almost entirely from the spruce tree. For years the manufacturers of pulp stripped the forests with little thought of the morrow. The visible supply of pulp timber is becoming limited. Unless tree-growing comes to the rescue, it will not be long before print paper will have to be made from some other material, if a satisfactory substitute can be found, or the pulp will have to be bought from other countries. I do not know whether you understand how much good timber is handled by newspaper readers. Let me give you some figures: The readers of the paper I represent handle sixty tons of it a day, taking into account the weekly edition. This is, in round numbers, 20,000 tons per year. We are already importing 20 percent of the pulp used in our paper mill. Think of it! In this great, big, new country, once almost covered with mighty forests, we find it advantageous today to import a common forest product from old Germany, where the highest standards of forest preservation and use are to be found. And this pulp, with a protective duty paid, is laid down in Kansas City for less than we have to pay for the domestic product of the same kind and quality. To make the paper for this one mill, the output of which is used exclusively by one paper, a daily average of more than one acre of spruce forest is used. It is a matter for congratulation that the press of the country has assumed a most friendly attitude toward the Conservation movement And not only is the press with you, but it is ready to do far more than it has been able to do thus far. This movement needs publicity—much publicity. It is new. It must be made familiar. The people must be informed in detail as to the location, the character, and the extent of their resources, and as to the means employed or proposed for the developing and fostering of those resources. The only effective means for the dissemination of this information is the press. Every year the Government spends millions of dollars on Government reports. These reports are necessary as matters of record and reference, but they are worthless for general reading. Many of the millions expended on these reports could be saved by limiting the number of copies to those that will be used and by leaving the mails unencumbered with the surplus (applause). If a part of the money thus saved were expended in the intelligent preparation of news matter pertaining to the various Government departments, giving to the people the interesting facts as they develop instead of depending on voluminous and unpopular reports for the education of the people in these matters, the work of the Government would be facilitated by popular enlightenment where it is now hampered by popular ignorance. It seems to me there is an opportunity here for the Conservation of our National revenues and our natural resources at the same time. What is needed is an intelligent publicity bureau or agent in each department and the more important subdivisions, capable of preparing, in news form, as the facts develop, the interesting and instructive features of the department's daily work. This does not mean that all the papers will use all this matter, but some of it would be used by all I am not suggesting an untried experiment. Some of the bureaus at Washington have publicity departments. Those of the Agricultural Department and the Geological Survey have been measurably effective, and manufacturers and importers have found large use for the popularized consular reports. But with a single exception there has been no near approach to the possibilities of cheap and helpful publicity in any department at Washington. The exception I have in mind is the Forest Service (applause). Do you know why the country knows so much more about forest conditions and the employed and proposed measures for their improvement than it knows about irrigation, reclamation, the use of the rivers, the potentialities of water-power, or the conservation of coal or oil or minerals? It is because the Forest Service, under the direction of Mr Gifford Pinchot, established a news service of such a character that the press of the country used its output freely and without the cost of one cent to the Government other than the cost of putting the matter in form acceptable to the press. (Applause) For some reason it was proposed, a couple of years ago, to prohibit, by Congressional enactment, the continuance of this publicity. But the effort resulted only in a complete vindication of the service. It was shown that only legitimate news had been given out, and that this news had appeared in an average of 9,000,000 copies of newspapers per month. These figures were based on clippings procured through the clipping bureaus, and did not include many publications that must have escaped the clippers. Now, if it had been undertaken to place this same matter before the same number of readers through the medium of the formal and technical reports of the department, the cost would have been more than 100 times as great—and nobody would have read them. As an illustration that newspapers want more Conservation news than they are getting through regular channels: A number of publishers recently formed a special Conservation service, which they maintained in Washington, whose business it is to follow exclusively the developments of this movement. But this service cannot be made what it should be made if the Government does not cooperate in this policy of needed publicity. Considering the waste that is incurred in the publishing of Government documents that have no popular educational value, it seems well nigh preposterous that there should not be ample provision, out of a saving that could be made by cutting off this waste, for the publication of matter that the people want and the newspapers stand ready to print free of cost. It would be no more absurd for this Congress to go into executive session, bar these gentlemen of the press from its Chairman Clapp—Ladies and Gentlemen: We often find a man who excels along some one line of work. The well-rounded man is the one who studies along every line; the truly great man is the well-rounded man, the man who studies the forces which make for the conditions in which he lives. We have such a man in this city, of whom we are all justly proud; a man who long ago, in the forge of hope and courage, welded his own fate with the possibilities of the then undeveloped Northwest, and who has lived to see the prophecies born of a study of conditions mature and develop in a splendid empire. It affords me great pleasure to present to you one who will speak on the subject of "Soils and Crops, Food and Clothing"—Mr James J. Hill, of Saint Paul. (Great and prolonged applause) Mr Hill—Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: I do not intend to take much of your time this afternoon, but I hope to bring before you some thoughts that may suggest the practical side of the subject we have to consider at this Congress. In order to make myself clearly understood and to be exact in my statements I will ask your indulgence in allowing me to read what I have to say: Every movement that affects permanently a nation's life passes through three stages. First it is the abstract idea, understood by few. Next it is the subject of agitation and earnest general discussion. Third, after it has won its way to a sure place in the national life, comes the era of practical adaptation. Mistakes and extravagances due to the enthusiasm of friends or the malice of enemies are corrected, details are fitted to actual needs, the divine idea is harnessed to the common needs of man. In this stage, which the Conservation movement has now reached, the most difficult and important work must be done. In our own history and in that of other nations we have seen this process many times repeated. Public education was an abstract idea in the time of Plato, a controversy of the Renaissance, and is still only partly realized. Back of all written records lived the man who first saw a vision of government universal, equal, free and just. But the world has not yet achieved the final adaptation of this mighty conception to man as we find him. Democracy is still in the fighting stage. Only a few years have passed since it first dawned upon a people who had reveled in plenty for a century that the richest patrimony is not proof against constant and careless waste; that a nation of spenders must take thought for its morrow or come to poverty. The first actual Conservation work of this Government was done in forestry, following the example of European countries. It soon became To pack the fact into a single statement, the need of the hour and the end to which this Congress should devote itself is to conserve Conservation. It has come into that peril which no great truth escapes—the danger that lurks in the house of its friends. It has been used to forward that serious error of policy, the extension of the powers and activities of the National Government at the expense of those of the States. The time is ripe and this occasion is most fitting for distinguishing between real and fanciful Conservation, and for establishing a sound relation of means to ends. (Applause) We should first exclude certain activities that come only indirectly under the term, "Conservation." The Reclamation Service is one. Its work is not preservation, but utilization. The arid lands of this country have been where they now are, the streams have flowed past them uselessly ever since Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden. Irrigation was practiced in prehistoric time. What we have to do is to bring modern methods to the aid of one of the oldest agricultural arts. It is mentioned here because its progress illustrates the dangers that beset Conservation projects proper. They are dangers inseparable from National control and conduct of affairs. The machine is too big and too distant; its operation is slow, cumbrous, and costly. So slow is it that settlers are waiting in distress for water promised long ago. So faulty has been the adjustment of time and money that Congress has had to authorize the issue of $20,000,000 of National obligations to complete projects still hanging in the air. So expensive is it that estimates have been exceeded again and again. The settler has had either to pay more than the cost figure he relied on or seek cheaper land in Canada. It costs the Government from 50 percent more to twice as much as it would private enterprise to put water on the land (applause). Under the Lower Yellowstone project the charge is $42.50 per acre, and one dollar per acre annually for maintenance. The Sunnyside project carries a charge of $52 per acre, and 95 cents maintenance. Under the North Platte project the charge is $45 per acre, plus a maintenance charge not announced. These projects, in widely separated localities, entail a land charge prohibitive to the Toward the conservation of our mineral resources little can be done by Federal action. The output is determined not by the mine owner, but by the consumer. The withdrawal of vast areas of supposed coal lands tends to increase price by restricting the area of possible supply. Nor can such deposits be utilized eventually except under some such system as is now employed. It is foolish to talk of leasing coal lands in small quantities in order to prevent monopoly. Mining must be carried on upon a large enough scale to be commercially possible. The lessee of a small area could not afford to install the necessary machinery and provide means of transportation without charging for the product a prohibitory price. The land should not be leased by the acre, but by the quantity of coal contained in the land (applause). A vein four feet thick contains about 4,000 tons to the acre; in many fields there are three, four, five, and six veins containing from fifteen to thirty feet of coal, or from fifteen to thirty thousand tons to the acre. What we want is intelligent understanding of the situation (applause). Under too restrictive conditions the coal would remain in the ground indefinitely. The people of the West see little practical difference between a resource withheld entirely from use and a resource dissipated or exhausted. They understand by Conservation the most economical development and best care of resources. It is the only definition consistent with the natural growth of communities in the history of the civilized world. The prairie States are more interested than any other in the question of cheap fuel. We do not depend on Alaska for our future supply. There is abundant coal on the Pacific Coast nearer to our seaports and commercial centers. Vancouver Island is underlain with it; today, while the railroad companies with which I am connected bought coal lands on Puget Sound, which they still own, we are prepared to burn oil from California instead of coal. I speak of that as a practical reason why we should, before we leap, look to see what the actual conditions are. Then, to say nothing of Nova Scotia on the Eastern coast, there is coal in Spitzbergen, within the Arctic Circle, actually nearer our Eastern markets than the coal of Alaska. While we lament the exhaustion of our coal supply, we maintain a tariff that compels us to draw upon it continuously. It would be well to cast out this beam before we worry too much over the Conservation mote. (Applause) The iron deposits of Minnesota, the most wonderful in the world, are today not only furnishing industry in the Nation with its raw material, but are piling up a school fund at home that is the envy of other States and adding more and more every year to the contents of the State treasury. Minnesota is considering the reduction of her general tax levy by one-half. Would it be better if these lands were today held idle and unproductive by the Federal Government, or worked only on leases whose proceeds went into the Federal treasury and enabled Congress to squander a few more millions in annual appropriations? (Applause) Against some forestry theories the West enters an even stronger plea. What the United States needs is neither reckless destruction nor an embargo upon our splendid Western commonwealths by locking up a considerable portion of their available area. There were, by the last report of the Forest Service, over 194,500,000 acres withdrawn from use in our forest reserves on June 30, 1909. Of this, nearly 58 percent, over 112,000,000 acres, or 175,000 square miles, lies in six Western States. That is an area six-sevenths the size of Germany or France. It is 80 percent of the size of the unappropriated and unreserved land in those six States. How are the cities, towns, and villages in those States to grow if so large a portion of the land is closed to the husbandman? I received today an official statement of the entire amount of public land withdrawn from settlement, and it is astounding. In area it is greater than the thirteen original States; it is nearly as great as New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois (applause). And at the same time, we are driving this year not less than 100,000 American farmers to the Canadian Northwest to seek homes there (applause). Now, I say to you that the area of this total withdrawal for various purposes of the public domain is greater than the cultivatable area of the entire Canadian Northwest. The forest reserves and the lands conveyed by Congressional grants to private interests in Oregon amount to some 50,000 square miles. More than half the area of this great State has been withdrawn by action of the Government in one way or another from cultivation and the enjoyment and profit of the people of the State. Over one-third of Idaho and 27 percent of Washington are forest reserves. Colorado is almost as badly off; and not more than 30 percent of its forest reserves is covered with merchantable timber, while about 40 percent has no timber at all. On the Olympic peninsula are lands reported to be withdrawn to conserve our water supply where the annual rainfall amounts to something like seven to ten feet (laughter). According to the official report, the cost of administering the Forest Service in 1909 was a little short of three million dollars, and the receipts were $1,800,000. The deficit on current account alone was over $1,100,000. The Forest Service has over 2,000 employes. In 1909 they planted 611 acres, and sowed 1,126 acres more. The West believes in forest preservation. But it believes practically and not theoretically. It realizes that a good thing may cost too much, and is not ignorant of the extravagant financial tendency of every Federal department and bureau. It wants all good agricultural land open to the settler, wherever it may be situated. It wants timber resources conservatively utilized, and not wasted or destroyed. In connection with forestry interests there is just now much question of the conservation of water-power sites. The demand is that Federal lands forming such sites should be withdrawn and leased for the profit and at the pleasure of the Federal Government. Against this the whole West rightly protests. The water-power differs from the coal deposit in that it is not destroyed by use. It will do its undiminished work as long as the rains fall and the snows melt. Not the resource but the use of it is a proper subject for Conservation and regulation. To withdraw these sources of potential wealth from present utilization is to take just so much from the industrial capital of the States in which they are situated. The attempted Federal control of water-powers is illegal, because the use of the waters within a State is the property of the State and cannot be taken from it (applause), and that the State may and actually does, in the case of Idaho for example, perfectly safeguard its water-powers from monopoly and make them useful without extortion has been shown conclusively by Senator Borah in a speech in the United States Senate in which this whole subject is admirably covered. Back in our history beyond the memory of most men now living there was the same controversy over the public domain. Ought it to be administered by the Government and disposed of for its profit, or opened to the people and shared with the States? Let experience determine which was the better guardian. The worst scandals of State land misappropriation, and there were many, are insignificant when compared with the record of the Nation. The total cash receipts of the Federal Government from the disposal of public and Indian lands from 1785 to 1909 were $423,451,673. The money is gone. It has been expended, wisely or unwisely, with other treasury receipts. It would be interesting to know how much the above sum exceeded the cost of administration. To go back 125 years and dig up the cost of the administration of public lands would be more of a task than I have time There remains an opportunity and a need of Conservation transcending in value all others combined. The soil is the ultimate employer of all industry and the greatest source of all wealth (applause). It is the universal banker. Upon the maintenance, unimpaired in quantity and quality, of the tillable area of the country its whole future is conditioned. Four years ago, and on many occasions since, I presented the facts and statistics that make land conservation incomparably the paramount issue with all who have at heart the prosperity of our people and the permanence of our institutions. It is unnecessary to repeat in detail what has now become matter of common knowledge and is accessible to all. For the last ten years the average wheat yield in the United States was 14.1 bushels, while in Germany it was 28.7 and in the United Kingdom 32.6. This is a measure of our general agriculture. The cattle other than milch cows on farms in the United States are over 4,000,000 fewer than they were three years ago. The number of hogs declined 7,000,000 in the last three years, and is less than it was twenty years ago. The increase in total value of food products is due to a great extent to higher prices. This failure to conserve soil fertility and maintain the agricultural interest is expressed in recent changes in our foreign trade. These are more than mere balance sheets; since, as you know, variations in international trade balances may produce wide-reaching effects upon all industry. While our total foreign trade last year was only a little less than the high record made in 1907, the distribution of it was vastly different. For the last fiscal year our imports were nearly $240,000,000 in excess of those for the same period in 1909, and $303,000,000 above A glance at the following table of our exports for the last five years in three great schedules dependent directly on the soil tells the whole story:
With the exception of the increase in breadstuffs in 1907-8, caused by our desperate need to send something abroad that would bring in money to stay a panic, the decline is constant and enormous. A continuance of similar conditions—and no change is in sight—must mean partial food famine and hardship prices in the home market; an annual indebtedness abroad which, having no foodstuffs to spare, we must pay in cash; and financial depression and industrial misfortune because we have drawn too unwisely upon the soil. This impending misfortune, only the conservation of a neglected soil and all the interests connected with it can avert. The saving feature of the situation is the interest already awakened in agricultural improvements; an interest which it should be the first object of this Congress to deepen and preserve. Much has been done, but it is only a beginning. The experiment station; the demonstration farm; agricultural instruction in public schools; emphasis upon right cultivation, seed selection, and fertilization through the keeping of live stock, all these are slowly increasing the agricultural product and raising the index of soil values. The work being done by the Agricultural Department under the care of our old Iowa friend, Secretary Wilson—who is a farmer from choice (applause)—is scientifically selecting the good from the bad and the wise from unwise methods, and the information is within the reach of every farmer of this country who will only put out his hand and ask for it. (Applause) But the work moves more slowly than our needs. The possibilities are great. One might make the comparison with current agriculture elsewhere almost at random, since European Russia is the only first-class country more backward than our own. Take the smallest First negatively, it has not been done by any artificial means or legislative hocus-pocus (applause). No bounty and no subsidy has any share in the national prosperity. The ruler of the country is the small farmer. He cultivates his acres as we cultivate a garden. He raises everything that belongs to the land. He fertilizes it by using every ounce of material from his live stock, and by purchasing more fertilizers when necessary. There are 42 high schools and 29 agricultural colleges in this little country with a population less than that of Massachusetts in 1900. Whatever else they teach, agriculture is taught first, last, and all the time, to young and old alike. The Dane is a farmer, and is proud of it. England and Ireland and Germany are studying his methods today. No people could imitate them with more profit than our own. (Applause) Recent good years have brought the average wheat yield per acre in the United States up to over fourteen bushels. Twice that would be considered poor in Great Britain and an average crop in Germany. Therefore twenty-five bushels per acre is a reasonable possibility for us. Suppose we raise it. The present wheat acreage of the United States is about 46,500,000 acres on the average. If it gave 25 bushels per acre, the crop would amount to 1,162,500,000 bushels. At our present rate of production and consumption we may cease to be a wheat exporting Nation within the next ten or fifteen years, perhaps earlier. With the larger yield we could supply all our own wants and have a surplus of 400,000,000 bushels for export. This is no fancy picture, but a statement of plain fact. Is there any other field where Conservation could produce results so immense and so important? Is there any other where it bears so directly upon our economic future, the stability of our Government, the well-being of our people? Any survey of practical Conservation would be imperfect if it omitted the almost desperate necessity at this time of conserving capital and credit. This subject deserves full and separate treatment. If anyone believes that this growth of expenditure is a consequence of the general material growth of the country, let him study the following brief table of comparative statistics. It establishes the indictment of national extravagance: This debauch of capital and credit has sent a poison circulating through the veins of the Nation. Everywhere the individual imitates the profligacy of his Government. Industry and saving are at a discount. Any luxury, any extravagance is warranted if funds for it can be raised by wasting capital or creating debt. There is just so much less money for productive employment: for payrolls and the extension of commerce and industries, and the creation of those new facilities for want of which the commerce of the country is and always must be limited (applause). Hence come also high prices, curtailment of business, distrust, and eventual distress. Hence come waste and idleness, and the increased cost of production that makes both business and employment slow and insecure. Any Conservation movement worthy of the name must place high upon its program the saving of capital and credit from the rapacious hands of socialist as well as monopolist (applause). Extravagance is undermining the industry of this country as surely as the barbarians broke down and looted that We must stand for Conservation everywhere; in the tedious as well as in the interesting application; where it cuts into our pleasure and habits, and jostles our comfortable, easy-going ways of thought, just as firmly as where it is hand in glove with self-interest. This is, above all things, an economic question. It is neither personal nor political. In such petty and partial interests it has found its worst obstructions and encountered its most serious reverses. The tariff in some respects is a great enemy of Conservation (applause). Whatever we may think of it as a general industrial policy, everyone can see that, by excluding the raw products of other countries, it throws the entire burden of their consumption upon our own resources, and thus exhausts them unnecessarily (applause). This appears clearly when we consider such commodities as we might obtain from Canada, a country that gained nearly 400,000 immigrants from the United States in the nine years up to April, 1909, and has probably taken another hundred thousand since; a country where it is absurd to talk about any actual advantage in the wage scale as compared with our own. The tariff on forest products cuts down our own forests, a tariff on coal depletes our mines, a tariff on any raw material forbids the conservation of similar natural resources here. (Applause). This Congress announced from the first its purpose to deal with the subject of Conservation in a practical spirit. The present condition of the movement, now in the third stage of its development, demands it. We have to apply the Conservation principle, as we have eventually to apply every other, to our domestic economics; to work it out in the experience and practice of everyday life. How this may be done can be stated in the form of a few conclusions that raise the word Conservation from the name of a more or less vague, diffuse, and disputable theory to that of a practical guide to legislation and administration. (Applause) Conservation is wholly an economic, not in any sense a political principle (applause). The Nation has suffered and still suffers so much from transferring other economic questions to politics that the mistake should not be repeated (applause). Whoever attempts to make Conservation the bone of a personal controversy or the beast of burden to carry any faction into power or popularity is its worst enemy. (Great applause) "Conservative" is the adjective corresponding to the noun "Conservation." Any other attitude toward this movement, either radical or reactionary, is treason to its name and to its spirit. It should mean no more and no less than dealing with our resources in a spirit of intelligence, honesty, care for both the present and the future, and ordinary business common sense. (Applause) Conservation does not mean forbidding access to resources that could be made available for present use. It means the freest and largest development of them consistent with the public interest and without waste. A bag of gold buried in the earth is useless for any purpose. So is an acre untilled, a mine unopened, a forest that bars the way to homes and human happiness. The determination in each case as to what extent a given resource should be utilized and how far reserved for the future is an intensely practical, individual, and above all a local question. It should be carefully considered in all its aspects by both Nation and State, and should finally rest within lines determined by proper legislation, as far as may be under the control of local authority. (Applause) Experience proves that resources are not only best administered but best protected from marauders by the home people who are most deeply interested and who are just as honest, just as patriotic and infinitely better informed on local conditions than the National Government can possibly be. (Applause) It is clear that every one of the many problems all over the country can be better understood where they are questions of the lives and happiness of those directly interested. Behind this, as behind every great economic issue, stand moral issues. Shall we, on the one side, deny to ourselves and our children access to the same store of natural wealth by which we have won our own prosperity, or, on the other, leave it unprotected as in the past against the spoiler and the thief? Shall we abandon everything to centralized authority, going the way of every lost and ruined government in the history of the world, or meet our personal duty by personal labor through the organs of local self-government, not yet wholly atrophied by disuse? Shall we permit our single dependence for the future, the land, to be defertilized below the point of profitable cultivation and gradually abandoned, or devote our whole energy to the creation of an agriculture which will furnish wealth renewed even more rapidly than it can be exhausted? Shall we permit the continued increase of public expenditure and public debt until capital and credit have suffered in the same conflict that overthrew prosperous and happy nations in the past, or insist upon a return to honest and practicable economy? This is the battle of the ages, the old, familiar issue. Is there in the country that intelligence, that self-denial, that moral courage, and that patriotic devotion which alone can bring us safely through? (Applause) I ask these questions not because there is any doubt of the answer in the minds of the American people, but that it may be made plain what a complex fabric the fates are weaving from the apparently commonplace happenings of our peaceful years, and how each generation and each epoch must render an account for the work of its own days. The unprecedented dignity of this assemblage, its nationally representative character, the presence here of those upon whom great Chairman Clapp—Ladies and Gentlemen: One among the recognized agencies for the spread of information in relation to our agricultural development is a paper published in Iowa by Mr Henry Wallace, who is known to us all. A discussion will now be led by Mr Wallace, and I take great pleasure in presenting him to this assemblage. (Applause) Mr Wallace—Mr Chairman, and Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congress: I have been asked to discuss the subject opened up by my old friend—and your friend—Mr James J. Hill. With very much that he has said, I most heartily agree. He speaks on these and other subjects "as one having authority, and not as the scribes." While listening to him I have been trying to get in my own mind a clear conception of certain fundamental questions that have been discussed at this Congress, and around which the discussion turns. I have been trying to put them in form, pointing out where he and I can agree and where we differ. I have come to the conclusion that a man has what he had, if he hasn't sold or contracted to sell it, or allowed somebody to steal it; that the United States has the resources that are now in the name of the United States and not under contract to be delivered, and not sold—or stolen—either in compliance with the letter of the law or in violation of both letter and spirit. In other words, there are certain assets or resources that we have and hold; and we all agree that the owner is entitled to the management and use of his assets (applause), and therefore that the people of the United States, as a people, are entitled to the use of whatever resources we may have remaining (applause). They are not for the benefit of any one man or any combination of men (applause), neither of any State (applause) or combination of States (applause), but for the whole people; therefore we can sell our coal lands or keep them. We will be wise if we keep them (applause). We can sell our forests, or say how they shall lie used, or we can let somebody steal them. We can hold on to our phosphate (and there is very little of these United States that won't be buying phosphates in fifty years) or we can let somebody control and ship it to Europe, to enable the Belgians and the Germans to grow 32 bushels We can do one of three things: We can deed these lands and these resources to the States, to be used as they think best. We can abdicate our sovereignty—perhaps modifying that to some extent, we can outline what the States shall do and what they shall not do, but that will involve abdicating our sovereignty and will lead to perpetual quarrels between the States (applause), such as now existing, for example, between Colorado and Kansas as to the use of water. Or, as Canada does, as Germany does, as Australia does, as Tasmania does, we can hold to those resources and lease them for money for the benefit of the whole people. (Applause) Now, my good friend Mr Hill seems to have grave doubts as to the capacity of the United States to handle its business with anything like the same skill with which he handles his (laughter and applause). He tells us that this Reclamation Service is costly—thirty, forty, or fifty dollars an acre, to be paid in ten years without interest—for what? To be able to make it rain just when we want to, and stop it when we want to; that is what irrigation is (applause). And Mr Hill would give five dollars an acre for twenty years if for all time and eternity he, his descendants and his assigns, could make it rain when he wanted to and make it stop when he wanted to (applause). Next to the owner of a quarter-section of land in Iowa I think that the man who owns fifty acres of irrigated land at fifty dollars an acre is a prince of the blood royal (applause and cry of "Good!"). It is the cheapest land in the United States, in the center of the highest civilization, the best education and the best schools. Mr Hill tells us also that the United States (I guess it was Solomon he had in his mind: he was the brother of a great waster) has received $400,000,000 or so for its Indian lands—he didn't know how much it cost to acquire them (millions, however)—and that he doesn't know what has become of the money. Well, I found since yesterday where some of it went—to this dam over here between Minneapolis and Saint Paul (great laughter and applause). He tells us that States are more economical than Nations. Now, isn't it a matter of fact that both State and Nation have been playing the part of the prodigal son, wasting our substance in riotous living—and that now we smell the husks? Gentlemen, the agricultural colleges have wasted a good deal of money. The State of Iowa had a great grant of land for improvement, and I give you my word you could run the whole thing through A Voice: Conservation ought to have been started a hundred years ago. Mr Wallace: You're right. But if the people of the United States have made up their minds that they are going to be in the future a Government "of the people by the people and for the people"; if we mean this in blood earnest (applause) and are willing to sacrifice our party affiliations (cries of "Good, good, good!"); if we are willing to pay money to attend conventions, without going on passes (cries of "You bet!" and cheers); if we are willing to make the sacrifices which always belong to a free government (applause)—then predatory wealth will no longer sit in the seats of Congress, and we shall have a democracy, a Government of the People instead of a Government of Plutocracy. (Applause and cheers) Gentlemen, it is just a question whether we have the stuff in us to really be a great self-governing people, a Nation that stands four-square to every wind that blows, that regards a law of the Almighty as supreme law and right and the only manhood worth having as that which comes in obedience to those great laws that govern men in all nations of the world (applause and cheers); it is a question whether we will pay the price for the liberties that our fathers gave us. (Applause) Now, with about everything that my good friend Mr Hill has said on the conservation of soil fertility I most heartily agree. I get an idea about once a year (laughter), and am able to put it in a way that seems fairly good to me: and for some time past I have been brooding over the thought that the great problem before the American people—a problem involving all other problems that vex us, tariffs, Conservation, trusts, everything—that the great problem we have before us is how to keep enough skilled labor on the land to enable the farmer to sell his products to the city at a price the people can afford to pay. Now, just let that soak into you (applause). The problem is to keep enough skilled labor on the farm to enable the farmer to grow the food for this and other nations at a price that the people The farmer is handicapped by the fact that he is tilling a partially infertile soil; he is handicapped worse in this way: he cannot possibly get, for love or money, the really skilled labor required to maintain the fertility of the soil while he is growing crops (applause). Why, you know how difficult it is in the country to get a hired hand, and you know that a hired girl in the home is a thing out of the question. There isn't a man here ugly enough, if he is a widower, but what could get two second wives where he could get one hired girl (laughter and applause). Now, we cannot use the labor of the city. Let a man go to town and become a lawyer or a doctor for ten or fifteen years, and then return to the country, and what is he good for? He has to serve an apprenticeship for four or five years before he is worth his board. We cannot use the labor of southern Europe except in the wheat fields or in the orchards; farm labor now is skilled labor; and we haven't got it. One reason we haven't got it is because my friend Mr Hill has been giving excursion rates up to Canada (laughter and applause)—for the benefit of his railroad, he says—and for the benefit of speculators who can paint a desert to look like the Garden of Eden, and make farmers believe that it is like the land of Egypt "as thou goest unto Zoar." If we could keep on the farm the boys and girls that grow up there we could give the people of the cities food at a price they could afford to pay; but there is the great problem. I will not solve it now, because I would have to discuss the tariff (laughter) and every other blooming thing that allures men to town—including high wages and easy times. Today the townsman is in trouble. The fact is that he cannot get the farmer's products at anything like the price the farmer ought to have (Voice: "Now you're talking"). The farmer never gets more Let us look a little further—but I must not detain you (Cries of "Go on, go on, go on"). This problem has been growing on us for years; ever since the iron rail and steam and electricity enabled us to build cities far remote from the lake or the river or the ocean, ever since we learned to get gold out of quarries instead of out of river sand, ever since human power was multiplied by machinery, ever since railroads netted the country with their systems: there has been a tendency to the development of great cities and a constant decrease in the number of men that work on the farm. We don't think now as we used to, because improved machinery (in most cases invented by farmers) has enabled the farm boy of fifteen years of age to do the work of eight or ten men—and at the same time has enabled him to rob the land more effectively than ever before. And this problem would have been met long ago if it had not been right here in this Mississippi valley there is the finest slice of land that the Lord ever made, to be given away by our benevolent Uncle Sam partly to the farmers and partly to the railroads—a country that needed neither spade nor axe to fit it for the plow; for the last twenty years we have been breaking it, mining it, robbing it, and selling its fertility to enable men in the great cities to live cheaply in the Old World and in this country (applause). The people of Kansas invited my good friend Secretary Wilson and me down there to talk about agriculture, and in going from our hotel to the place of meeting we actually fell over bags of bran that were put out there to send to Denmark to make butter and cheese to come back and be eaten in Kansas (laughter). This is the way we have actually been selling, piecemeal, our fertility. Why, you men remember when corn was sold at 15 and even 10 cents The real problem is, how we are going to furnish bread to the people at a price that they can afford to pay? I have no hand-me-down solution for that; it is the biggest problem that I know of, and I can venture only some suggestions. First, we can add a little to our production through irrigation. That is a slow process, and limited at best. We can add some more by drainage. We can add a good deal to the yield per acre by better methods of farming. But we are limited, as I have said, largely by the lack of skilled labor. The merchant, the city man, if he is to live on his income, must improve his system of distribution; he must in some way or other, get rid of the go-betweens. Some things will have to be done by railroads and some by Congress, and a number of things will have to be done that they will all say can't be done—I'm tired of that story, that you can't do anything. Our railroad friends have told us that we can't pass interstate commerce laws, it's unconstitutional; that we can't stop the giving of passes and rebates, that it's unconstitutional. Now, we have done all those things. The people of the United States can do anything that is right! (applause), though they can't permanently succeed in doing wrong (applause); and these things we have been told we can't do we have done, and everybody says it is right. Sometimes I take great comfort in watching some of our great "captains of industry," railroad magnates like Mr Hill. To see them you would imagine they had been reading the Psalms of David and saying, "It was good for me that I was afflicted; before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I love"—the Interstate Commerce Law (laughter). The trouble with them is that they turn round and oppose our railroad laws, and the measures brought up by the voice of the people, and insist that they can't be enforced. If the farmers are to sell their products in sufficient quantities to cities at a price that they can afford to pay, the calm and considerate judgment and the earnest cooperation of every class of our people are needed. We have problems before us that cannot be settled today Mr Hill—I want to apologize to Brother Wallace because I did not make myself entirely understood when I indicated that $50 or $42 or $45 an acre for Government-irrigated land is too high. He says that I would give $100—and I would, if I had to; but if that land were left with private enterprises, or if the people of the State alongside of this $42 and $45 and $50 land were putting water on their land for $15, I wouldn't charge the settler $50 or $42. (Laughter and applause) Chairman Clapp—Ladies and Gentlemen: There is a tradition in Washington that the present very efficient Secretary of Agriculture established the Department of Agriculture, because of his long service in that position. I have to dispel that illusion. Nevertheless his service has made that Department what it is today; and I take great pleasure in presenting to you Secretary Wilson. (Great applause) Secretary Wilson—Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: I have enjoyed the two last speeches more than anything else I have heard since I have been here, although I have never attended a meeting anywhere that I can remember where there were so many big men who do things in the world. The greatest regret I have is that there must be more than a hundred men here well worth hearing who will not have opportunity to speak on account of lack of time. Mr Hill and Mr Wallace have talked about things that I have not done. Fourteen years ago I went down to Washington with President McKinley to do something with the Department of Agriculture. I could see right well from tendencies that had originated some time previous a growing and a development that now at this present time have come to a head. I saw the necessity for Conservation of the natural utilities of this country, the necessity for Conservation of soils and forests and water-powers and all those things; and I went to work. I have never gone to Congress to get help or money without getting it at once. If I have failed to do something for agriculture, the fault is mine and not that of Congress, because they have never criticized me, except that I have not asked for enough money. I have found it necessary to educate men, or to have them educated, along new lines. Search history as far back as you see fit to go, and you will find that there has been no education whatever for the Mr Hill and Mr Wallace have both spoken wisely of the soil. That is the source of our wealth. When our good people travel abroad, the farmer pays the bill; when you beautiful ladies purchase diamonds—and sometimes bring them back in your hats—the farmer pays the bill (laughter). Of course, since the Civil War the farmer has been keeping the balance of trade in our favor—has paid all our foreign debts, has paid the cost of our wars, has paid all the expenses of shipments to foreign ports; but a new day has come. While the farm has been producing considerably more and its area has been increasing, certain things have occurred that have a momentous influence on the present and on the future. We have not been producing so fast as we have been increasing in population; it costs too much to get breakfast and dinner and supper, and we eat three times a day. The serious problem which presents itself to us now is that it costs too much to live. I never want to see the day come when the American workingman shall be reduced to the condition of the European who makes his dinner on bread alone and still lives. (Applause) What are the prospects of getting cheaper food to eat? Do we want to bring men from Central America? They are diseased. Do we want to bring them from Mexico? They are not adapted to our climate. We do not care to bring them in much from Canada, because they have no corn up there, and don't eat that kind of food. I see some rays of hope in our leaden sky. The South has in the past suffered from a pest known as the cattle-tick which prevents the development of domestic animals, and they have not given us as much meat as we have shipped to them; but Congress gave my Department money to try to get rid of this tick, and we have been at work for three years and have cleared the pest from the equivalent of an area of three great States, 140,000 square miles (applause), and it will not be many years until all the South is cleared of the cattle-tick. Then the southern States will begin to contribute materially to our food production, There are two prominent ways of increasing the producing capacity of a people: First, there is Conservation demonstration (we shall be using this word "Conservation" in our prayers if we don't look out). (Laughter) Last year we had 12,500 boys in four southern States, all under sixteen years of age, each of whom grew an acre of corn—the South never grew as much corn in its history as it did last year—and some of those boys grew over 150 bushels to the acre (applause). They sold it at different prices. They were promised, as an encouragement, free tickets to Washington to see the President and the Capitol, and that the Secretary would give them diplomas. Well, I thought little about this until in marched the boys—looking very serious—each exactly like a man who is getting an LL.D. from a university. The first view of those boys was amusing, but the next one to me was very pathetic. A diploma, you know, is given to a man or a woman who does good work in a college course. Didn't the boy who grew 150 bushels of corn to the acre do something? He did; he did the best there was in him; he put his will into the work. I signed the diplomas, and those boys went out as proud as any boys ever went away from a university. This year we have 50,000 boys in the southern States, each under sixteen years of age, each growing an acre of something, each getting lessons and hints in all directions from everybody that can give them, with regard to how to grow crops; we have 400 agents in the South. Now let me tell you something. You will find in every northern and eastern and western State a minority of good farmers and, I am compelled to confess, a majority of poor farmers. They don't know how to farm; they have yet to learn. Where did bad farming begin, do you think? Why, back in the eastern States where they do everything well—except farming. Now where is there worse farming than there? I believe that the President of Tulane University used to live there; perhaps he can tell us. When I was a boy I went to church on Sunday and to prayer meeting in the middle of the week—I had to (laughter)—but they didn't educate the boys toward the farms; they educated them toward the professions, toward the mechanic arts, toward the factories. And when they were big enough and had an education they left the farm, they left the father and mother there, and by and by when the father and mother couldn't farm any more they rented out the farm—and today the same thing is beginning And we began manufacturing in our country at the time we began robbing our soil. The last half-century we have built up our manufactories at an astonishing rate. Why have we built them up so fast; why have they risen to such tremendous figures? Because our people were fed cheaper and better than the people who worked in factories in any other country. But what is the condition now? Are our people still better fed and more cheaply that work in the factories, that work for the railroads, that work in the mines? No! There is where the trouble comes; that is what has arrested the attention of our people. Every year, maybe oftener (Mr Hill could tell better than I can), the men that work for railroads notify the president that they want more wages because they can't live; and of course he has to raise their wages. While we were feeding Europe, there was no difficulty in getting cheap food here in the United States for our workingmen; but, as Mr Hill told you, and gave you statistics for it—it is pretty hard to follow a man like him, who has all the statistics, and Dr Wallace, who has all the philosophy and wit, but I will do the best I can (laughter)—we are sending less and less food to foreign countries and paying more and more for what our workingmen eat at home. We are not paying off debts any more, though our people are still buying diamonds and pearls—you see the rows we are having in New York when our traveling Americans come back, and want to get their jewels through the custom-house for nothing and hide them and all that; I have no sympathy with it—but we are not discussing the tariff here at all; I never talk politics and won't allow it; I have 12,000 men in my Department and every man knows I'll discharge him in a minute if he talks politics (laughter and applause); we are considering the natural resources of the country and trying to conserve them. (Applause and cries of "Good!") As the Department grew we organized a bureau for animals, another for plants, one for forests, one for chemistry, and one for soils; and all along the line we have those great bureaus at work. We are the practical fellows who conserve; we are doing it every day. I have just been out among the forests myself four or five weeks, helping to save the Government's property out there. But the great question comes down to the soil. There is no classical college or university that teaches anything about the soil, not one single thing. From the time that Samuel had the school of the prophets at Bethel down to the present day, there never has been anything taught to the people with regard to the soil on which they walk and from which they get their living. I have organized a bureau for it. We are studying With regard to the literature of the farm: There was none when I was a young fellow; there was no college for farmers. I had to get what I did get from observation and from a store of recollection of older men. But now we have an agricultural college in each State. We have an experiment station in each State. We have 3,000 men making research in the Department of Agriculture at Washington, all specialists, the foremost in their lines in the world. When one of those men makes inquiry into something and reports, we put his name to it and print it and send it out to the people without expense. We sent out 20,000,000 pieces last year (applause). And any of you who want anything we have, no matter whether you are farmers or not, you are welcome to it. Some of the best encouragement that we have comes from those who are not farmers at all. I have told you of the genesis of the soil-robber; is he here in the Mississippi valley? The old-time farmer educated his children, but he educated them to do anything under the sun but farm. When the boy graduated, when he got through with his education, he went anywhere but to the farm. That was until within a few years the custom. The other day I wrote to the dean of the Iowa Agricultural College that several people had applied to me for men to superintend farms, and that a newspaper man wanted a farm expert to go into his office at a good salary, and asked—"How many young men do you graduate this year in a four-year agricultural course?" He replied, and I think he said "We graduated some seventy in a four-year course, but none of them left the State; they are all going back to the farm" (great applause and cry of "Good!"). Those men know something. Now, are you doing that in Minnesota? You have always had a fine agricultural school here connected with your State University, and you have an open door into the four-year academic course in the University; you are doing much for agriculture and education. Yet we are where we are today with regard to scarce food and dear meat because we didn't begin educating the young farmer sooner. But he is going to catch on. There would be a universal introduction of agricultural education into the common and secondary schools of the country if teachers could be found. That is the great difficulty. Fifty years ago, when Congress endowed agricultural colleges, that was the trouble. They could start the college, they could erect a building, but there was no library, there was no professor who knew anything about agriculture, and the great trouble is a man can only teach what he Do not be uneasy about the forests; at the last session, Congress gave me $400,000 more than they had ever given me before to take care of the forests. Do not be uneasy about the coal, the gas, the oil, and the phosphates; President Taft has withdrawn all those until Congress indicates what shall be done with them. But the soil, Gentlemen, the soil; the big price for meat, the big price for bread; these are things to study. We can improve our soil. One of our speakers this afternoon told us that you cannot grow soil. I believe that, once you wash it away. But you can reduce it, beyond the point of profitable production of crops; that you can do, and that is being done. The soil-robber works in Iowa, and I fear he is at work in Minnesota. The old folks have gone to town; and the Lord knows nobody wants them there, because when you want to improve the town with gas and sewer and water and things of that kind, the farmer won't vote for them; he is regarded as a nuisance; everybody wishes he would stay on the farm, and I wish he would. And when the old farmer and his wife go to town, they sell off everything; they rent the farm to a man who has no means to stock it with cattle and sheep, hogs and poultry; he grows grain to sell, he grows hay to sell, and those farms grow worse and worse every year. That is the situation we are in. (Applause) We are making some progress, some headway. The Government gave to the emigrant from abroad, to everybody who wanted it as long as they lasted, a claim in the rainy belt; but there are no lands left for giving away in the rainy belt. Something can be done in regard to our dry-land farming; something can be done in regard to irrigation. As Mr Hill intimated (in fact, he delivered a great deal of my speech), there is not much being done in the line of irrigation. Take a trip out West and watch the rivers as you cross them, and you will see that we are wasting far more water than we are using—though in certain neighborhoods in Colorado highly intelligent people are every year building more dams away up in the mountains and saving their winter and spring-flood waters. That is going on and on, and it should go on until all the waters in the mountains are saved for application to the land. Do you remember the history of irrigation in the valley of the Po, in Italy? There are more people to the square mile there than are found in almost any other part of the world. They began at the headwaters of the tributaries and built great dams to hold up the water to an amount suitable for the growing of crops, something like twenty inches or more; and they built on down to the mouth of the Po. Now when there comes a drought like we had this year, they let water out on the fields, and thus get a maximum crop. Without that extra water, at a time of drought their crop would wither and fail. I How do the people of the Old World raise big crops? If you followed Mr Hill's statistics you learned they didn't know as much there once as they do now, for they have raised their crop production from 20 to 30 bushels an acre. He also alluded to the Danes, who by good farming are enabled to sell enormous amounts of farm products. How do they keep that land up? I will tell you what a great many of them are doing. They buy mill-feeds from the United States; they buy bran and shorts, they buy the cottonseed of the South and the flaxseed of Minnesota, and feed their dairy cows. That is a highly intellectual job, isn't it, for an American citizen, to grow food for a Danish cow? But the Dane has his eyes open; he knows. He sells $40,000,000 worth of butter and cheese to England every year, but puts back all the fertility on the farm; and that is what has brought up his little fifteen-acre farm, or his forty-acre farm. He has brought it up by keeping and feeding his cows on our mill-feeds, mind you; and he is prosperous—and we are not so prosperous only because we rob ourselves. A Voice—Bran doesn't cost any more in Denmark than in America. Secretary Wilson—It is American bran, though. And let me tell you something else. The meats you grow up here cost hardly any more in Europe than they cost here, because the retailer over there hasn't got all the frills that the retail dealer has here, and is satisfied with a smaller profit. (Applause) Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am merely outlining some of the remarks that I prepared and gave to the newspaper people; and I have no doubt you have listened to me as long as you care to (cries of "Go on, go on"). I have enjoyed my visit here. I am on record as saying that these northwestern States, beginning here and extending on west, are the healthiest we have; their waters are good; their climate is fine; they are going to grow vigorous men and handsome women. If we are going to have all their benefits you should conserve your soil, so that your great-grandchildren will have better soil than you have today. Down in Iowa, where I have lived for 46 years, the soil grows bigger crops today than it did fifty years ago; and it is still improving. You have extended to me the greatest compliment a hospitable people can bestow on a stranger, and that is to give me your attention. I thank you. (Great applause.) Chairman Clapp—Ladies and Gentlemen: We will now listen to a discussion by Honorable F. C. Stevens, Member of Congress from this district. (Applause) Representative Stevens—Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: You are fortunate this afternoon, so far as my discussion is concerned. I was assigned to discuss an address by Senator Dolliver, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, on the subject of "Cattle, Food, and Leather." We greatly regret the enforced absence of Senator Dolliver, because he is informed on that subject and could have given us a discussion of great benefit. I congratulate myself that I am not obliged to follow him, because I know too little about his subject. So I shall briefly discuss something I do know about. In the very able address of Mr Hill, and in the very bright discussion of Mr Wallace which followed, there was a general criticism of Congress for undue expenditures of public money. I want to tell this audience that Congress, instead of being extravagant, is often unduly economical of the people's money. The money we spend is what the people want us to spend, and we do not spend nearly as much as they want us to. The estimates that were sent in by the heads of the departments (of which Secretary Wilson is one) aggregated nearly two hundred millions of dollars more than the expenditures which Congress authorized, and the estimates which came from the field officers to the heads of these great departments, for example, like that of Secretary Wilson; from the post-offices scattered throughout the country; from the officers of the War and Navy Departments, scattered all over the world; and from the officers of the State and other departments, were, I will venture to say, nearly two hundred million dollars more still: so that Congress actually did not spend more than two-thirds as much as the people of the United States in their respective localities wanted spent. There is not a single large convention in the United States similar to this—which is one of the most magnificent in the history of this section of the country—that does not call upon Congress for the expenditure of large sums of money, and I will venture to predict that the resolutions, which will be adopted by this Congress will call for a large appropriation from the National treasury. We have in Washington every year a Rivers and Harbors Congress, composed of 4,000 of the brightest, broadest, most patriotic business men of the United States, who go there as delegates, spend their own money to go, and then ask large expenditures from the people's treasury. Scattered all over this country, meeting probably in every State in the Union, are various voluntary assemblages of our People demanding various improvements by the Federal Government, and every one asking for expenditures of the people's money. You never yet have heard of a convention which has met anywhere at anybody's expense asking for a cutting down of expenditures. If there is any one man who is popular in the United States it is the man who calls for the expenditure of the people's money; the men who are the most unpopular, and are condemned and criticised in public life, are those who try to cut down the expenses and be economical with the Just one suggestion more: It is easy to criticise and ridicule something that a man knows but little about, and I have noticed that in this discussion of Conservation each man is almighty anxious to conserve that which interests him; and one of the latest examples of that was afforded by the statement of Mr Wallace in condemnation of the dam between Saint Paul and Minneapolis. Now, in advance I want to state that I am not responsible for that dam; it was there before I entered public life. But there is one thing we are trying to do; we are trying to enforce the principle of practical Conservation, and I wish to call attention to that as a sample of ridicule sometimes seen in the discussion of a subject that really interests the people. The United States thirty years ago started, at the headwaters of the Mississippi, six of the largest storage reservoirs for water in the world, with a capacity of many thousands of millions of gallons of water, designed to improve the navigation of the river and raise it in times of drought eighteen inches here at the levee of Saint Paul. That enormous storage of water in the river should be utilized for the practical benefit of the people of the United States. That is the practical basis for all theories of Conservation. A board of engineers was ordered by Congress to make an investigation of the use of the dam at the Twin Cities, and they have reported that a dam can be built and it has been ordered by Congress and is under construction (it is the one ridiculed). It will be thirty feet high and will yield 15,000 horsepower of electrical energy, worth here $25 per horsepower-year, making a total value of $375,000 per annum, at an expenditure in all not to exceed $2,000,000. It will pay the United States the money that it invests in that dam. It is expected that the United States will sell, for a reasonable price, that electrical energy to the cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota; these cities can be the best lighted in the world and save a hundred thousand dollars each annually (applause); and, more than that, we will have there the most beautiful lake in the world, extending from the historical falls of Minnehaha below to the great and beautiful University of Minnesota above. That is a practical example of Conservation (applause). Before any of these gentlemen come forward flippantly to ridicule the public works going on in any part of the country, they should realize that there may be some things they don't know about. (Applause) Only one suggestion more (because we all want to hear from Professor Bailey): It is easy to criticise Congress as a whole; it is fashionable to do it; Congress hasn't any friends anywhere; but just remember this: it is a necessary evil; it is the concrete voice of Chairman Clapp—Ladies and Gentlemen, we will now have an address on "Conservation in Country Life," by Dr Liberty Hyde Bailey, Dean of State Agricultural College, Cornell University, and Chairman of the Country Life Commission. It affords me great pleasure to introduce Professor Bailey. (Applause) Professor Bailey—Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen: Because of the lateness of the hour, and because of the very great treat which you have had this afternoon in the presentation of the fundamental questions of country life, I shall only call your attention to three or four topics which, perhaps, have not been touched by others who have spoken from this platform. Two great economic and social movements are now before the country—Conservation, and Country Life. The Conservation movement is the expression of the idea that the materials and agencies that are part of the furniture of the planet are to be utilized by each generation carefully, and with real regard to the welfare of those who are to follow us. The Country Life movement is the expression of the idea that the policies, efforts, and material well-being of the open country must be highly sustained, as a fundamental essential of a good civilization; and it recognizes the fact that rural society has made relatively less progress in the past century than has urban society. Both movements are immediately economic, but in ultimate results they are social and moral. They rest on the assumption that the welfare of the individual man and woman is to be conserved and developed, and is the ultimate concern of governments; both, therefore, are phases of a process in social evolution. Not only the welfare but the existence of the race depends on utilizing the products and forces of the planet wisely, and also on At the bottom, therefore, the Conservation and Country Life movements rest on the same premise; but in their operation, and in the problems that are before them, they are so distinct that they should not be confounded or united. These complementary phases may best work themselves out by separate organization and machinery, although articulating at every point; and this would be true if for no other reason than that a different class of persons, and a different method of procedure, attached to each movement. The Conservation movement finds it necessary, as a starting-point, to attack intrenched property interests, and it therefore finds itself in politics, inasmuch as these interests have become intrenched through legislation. The Country Life movement lacks these personal and political aspects. These Subjects Have a History Neither "Conservation" nor "Country Life" is new except in name and as the subject of an organized movement. The end of our original resources has been foreseen from time out of mind, and prophetic books have been written on the subject. The need of a quickened country life has been recognized from the time that cities began to dominate civilization; and the outlook of the high-minded countryman has been depicted from the days of the classical writings until now. On this side of mineral and similar resources, the geologists and others among us have made definite efforts for conservation; and on the side of soil fertility, the agricultural chemists and the teachers of agriculture have for a hundred years maintained a perpetual campaign of conservation. So long and persistently have those of us in the agricultural and some other institutions heard these questions emphasized, that the startling assertions of the present day as to the failure of our resources and the coordinate importance of rural affairs have not struck me with any force of novelty. But there comes a time when the warnings begin to collect themselves, and to crystallize about definite points; and my purpose in suggesting this history is to emphasize the importance of the two movements now before us by showing that the roots run deep, back into human experience. It is no ephemeral or transitory subject that we are now met to discuss. All really fundamental movements are the results of long-continued discussion and investigation, but it requires a great generalizer and organizer, and one possessed of prevision, to concrete scattered facts into powerful national movements. The one who recognized the existence of these questions, who saw the significance of the problems, who aided to assemble them, and who projected them into definite lines The Conservation movement is now approaching its full; the Country Life movement is a slower and quieter tide, but it will rise with great power. These are the twin economic and social questions that the Roosevelt administration raised for our consideration. (Applause) They are not party-politics subjects I have said that these are economic and social problems and policies. I wish to enlarge this view. They are concerned with saving, utilizing, and augmenting, and only secondarily with administration. We must first ascertain the facts as to our resources, and from this groundwork impress the subject on the people. The subject must be approached by scientific methods. It would be unfortunate if such movement became the exclusive program of a political party, for then the question would become partisan and probably be removed from calm or judicial consideration, and the opposition would equally become the program of a party. Every last citizen should be naturally interested in the careful utilization of our native materials and wealth, and it is due him that the details of the question be left open for unbiased discussion rather than be made the arbitrary program, either one way or another, of a political organization. The Conservation principle is a plain economic and social problem rather than a political issue. (Applause) The Country Life movement is equally a scientific problem, in the sense that it must be approached in the scientific spirit. It will be inexcusable in this day if we do not go at the subject with only the desire to discover the facts and to arrive at a rational solution by non-political methods. The first recommendation of the Commission on Country Life is that the Government begin taking stock of rural life in order that we may have definite facts on which to begin a reconstructive program. The soil is the greatest of all resources The resources that sustain the race are of two kinds—those that lie beyond the power of man to reproduce or increase, and those that may be augmented by propagation and by care. The former are the water, the air, the sunshine, and the mines of minerals, metals, and coal; the latter are the living resources, in crop and live-stock. Intermediate between the two classes stands the soil, on which all living resources depend. Even after all minerals and metals and coal are depleted, the race may sustain itself in comfort and progress so long as the soil is productive, provided, of course, that water and air and sunshine are still left to us. Beyond all the mines of coal and all the To my mind, the Conservation movement has not sufficiently emphasized this problem. It has laid stress, I know, on the enormous loss by soil erosion, and has said something of inadequate agricultural practice; but the main question is yet practically untouched by the movement—the plain problem of handling the soil by all the millions who, by skill or blundering or theft, produce crops and animals out of the earth. Peoples have gone down before the lessening power of the land, and in all probability other peoples will yet go down. The course of empire has been toward the unplundered lands. Thinner than the skin of an apple is the covering of the earth that man tills. Beyond all calculation and all comprehension are the powers and the mysteries of the soft soil layer of the earth. We do not know that any vital forces pulsate from the great interior bulk of the earth. Only on the surface does any nerve of life quicken it into a living sphere. And yet, from this attenuated layer have come numberless generations of giants of forests and of beasts, perhaps greater in their combined bulk than all the soil from which they have come; and back into this soil they go, until the great life-principle catches up their disorganized units and builds them again into beings as complex as themselves. The general evolution of this soil is toward greater powers; and yet, so nicely balanced are these powers that within his lifetime a man may ruin any part of it that society allows him to hold; and in despair he abandons it and throws it back to nature to reinvigorate and to heal. We are accustomed to marvel at the power of man in gaining dominion over the forces of nature—he bends to his use the expansive powers of steam and the energy of the electric currents, and he ranges through space in the light that he concentrates in his telescope; but while he is doing all this he sets at naught the powers in the soil beneath his feet, wastes them, and deprives himself of vast sources of energy. Man will never gain dominion until he learns from nature how to maintain the augmenting powers of the disintegrating crust of the earth. We can do little to control or modify the atmosphere or the sunlight; but the epidermis of the earth is ours to do with it much as we will. It is the one great earth resource over which we have dominion. The soil may be made better as well as worse, more as well as less; and to save the producing powers of it is far and away the most important consideration in the Conservation of natural resources. No man has a right to plunder the soil The man who owns and tills the soil owes an obligation to his fellowmen for the use that he makes of his land; and his fellowmen owe an equal obligation to him to see that his lot in society is such that he The man who plunders the soil is in very truth a robber, for he takes that which is not his own and he withholds food from the mouths of generations yet to be born. No man really owns his acres; society allows him the use of them for his life-time, but the fee comes back to society in the end. What, then, will society do with those persons who rob society? The pillaging or reckless land-worker must be brought to account and be controlled, even as we control other offenders. (I know that the soil-depletion idea is now challenged; but I am sure that the Conservation ideal must be applied to soil maintenance even as it is applied to other maintenance. If it transpires that plants hold a different relation to the soil-content than we have supposed, we still know that poor farming makes the land unproductive and that the saving of wastes is a desirable human quality; and we shall probably need to change only our phraseology to make the old statement broadly correct.) I have no socialistic program to propose. The man who is to till the land must be educated: there is more need, on the side of the public welfare, to educate this man than any other man whatsoever (applause). When he knows, and when his obligations to society are quickened, he will be ready to become a real conservator; and he will act energetically as soon as the economic pressure for land-supplies begins to be acute. When society has done all it can to make every farmer a voluntary conservator of the fatness of the earth, it will probably be obliged to resort to other means to control the wholly incompetent and the recalcitrant; at least, it will compel the soil-robber to remove to other occupation, if economic stress does not itself compel it. We shall reach the time when we shall not allow a man to till the earth unless he is able to leave it at least as fertile as he found it. (Applause) It is a pernicious notion that a man may do what he will with his own. The whole tendency of social development is away from this idea. A person may not even have the full control of his own children: society compels him to place them in school, and it protects them from over-work and hardship. A man may not breed diseased cattle. No more should he be allowed wantonly to waste forests or to make lands impotent, even though he "owns" them. (Applause) Ownership vs. Conservation This discussion leads me to make an application to the Conservation movement in general. We are so accustomed to think of privileged While we not infrequently state the problem to be the reservation of our resources for all the people, and then assume that if all the resources were in private ownership the problem would thereby be solved, yet, in fact, the Conservation question is one thing and the ownership of property quite another. A corporation may be the best as well as the worst conservator of resources; and likewise, private or individual ownership may be the very worst as well as the best conservator. The individual owner, represented by the "independent farmer," may be the prince of monopolists (applause), even though his operations compass a very small scale. The very fact that he is independent, with the further fact that he is intrenched behind the most formidable of all barriers—private property rights—insures his monopoly. In the interest of pure Conservation, it is necessary to control the single man as well as the organized men. In the end Conservation must deal with the individual man—that is, with a person. It matters not whether this person is a part of a trust, or lives alone a hundred miles beyond the frontier, or is the owner of a prosperous farm—if he wastes the heritage of the race, he is an offender. We are properly devising ways whereby the corporation holds its property or privileges in trust, returning to government (or to society) a fair rental; that is, we are regulating the corporation and making it responsible to the people. What shall we do with the unattached man, to make him also responsible? Shall we hold the corporate plunderer to strict account, and let the single separate plunderer go scot free? (Applause) In the last analysis, as measured by the results to society, there is no essential difference between corporate ownership and individual ownership. The philosophy of saving The Conservation of natural resources, therefore, resolves itself into the philosophy of saving, while at the same time making the most and best advancement in our own day. We have not developed much consciousness of saving when dealing with things that come free to our hands, as the sunshine, the rain, the forests, the mines, the streams, the earth; and the American has found himself so much in the midst of plenty that saving has seemed to him to be parsimony, or at least beneath his attention. As a question of public action, however, conscientious saving represents a very high development. A high sense Civilization, thus far, is built on the process of waste. Materials are brought from forest and sea and mine, certain small parts are used, and the remainder is discarded or destroyed; more labor is wasted than is usefully productive; but what is far worse, the substance of the land is taken in unimaginable quantities and dumped wholesale, through endless sewerage and drainage systems, into the sea. It would seem as if the human race were bent on finding a process by which it can most quickly ravish the earth and make it incapable of maintaining its teeming millions. We are rapidly threading the country with vast conduits by which the fertility of the land can flow away unhindered into the unreachable reservoirs of the ocean. (Applause) The factories that fabricate agricultural products are likely to be midway stations in the progress of the fertility on its way to the sea. The refuse is dumped into streams; or if it is made into fertilizing materials, it seldom returns to the particular areas whence it came. A manufactory will expend any effort in improving its machinery and practice to enable it to get more material out of its products, but may do little or nothing to increase the production back on the farms. A sugar-beet or other factory may drain its country until the country can no longer raise the product; whereas, by developing a rational system of husbandry and returning the wastes, as in some European countries, it might maintain the land-balance. Any good milk-products factory should develop sound milk-making on the farms of the region, as any good canning factory should raise the standard of production in the fruits and vegetables that it uses; and this should always be done with the object of preserving and even increasing the land-power. A factory owes an obligation to the open country that supports it. For these and for other reasons, the city always tends to destroy its province. The city takes everything to itself—materials, money, men—and gives back only what it cannot use or what it discards as useless: it does not constructively build up its contributory country. City dwelling and country dwelling are the two opposite developments of human affairs. The future state of society depends directly on the finding of some real economic and social balance between the two, some species of cooperation that will build and serve them both. This is the fundamental problem of the social structure. Although city people and country people are rapidly affiliating in acquaintanceship, these poles of society are not yet effectively coming together cooperatively on economic lines. (Applause) The Conservation of food The fundamental problem for the human race is to feed itself. It has been a relatively easy matter to provide food and clothing thus One would think, from current discussions, that the single way to provide the food for the population is to raise more products by moving more people on the land; but this is not at all nub of the question. More products will be raised as rapidly as it pays persons to raise them, and there are now sufficient people on the land to double its productiveness; and the necessary increase of population will come automatically with increasing profits in the business. Much is said about the necessity of intenser methods of farming, and we all recognize the need; but the chief reason why our people do not raise 300 bushels of potatoes to the acre is that it does not yet pay in most cases to produce the extra yield. The comparative statistics of yields in different countries are useful as appealing to the imagination, but they may be wholly fallacious as guides. What we need is a thorough inquiry into the course of trade from potato-patch to consumer, to see where the profit goes. We need a greater number of competent farmers, to be sure, whether they hail from the country or the city; the city will still attract those laborers who cannot work alone and who watch the clock, and the city provides the organization or machinery to make them of use; but the real food question and cost-of-living question is the problem of maintaining the producing-power of the earth by means of better farming. We think we have developed intensive and perfected systems of agriculture; but as a matter of fact, and speaking broadly, a scientifically permanent agriculture on national lines is yet unknown in the world. In certain regions, as in Great Britain, the productivity of the land has been increased over a long series of years, but this has been accomplished to a great extent by the transportation of fertilizing materials from the ends of the earth. The fertility of England, according to authorities, has been drawn largely from the prairies and plains of America, from which it has secured its food supplies, from the guano deposits in islands of the seas, from the bones of animals and men, from the mummies of Egypt (applause). The rotation of crops is not itself a complete means of maintaining fertility. We begin to understand how it is possible to maintain the producing-power of the surface of the earth, and there are certain regions in which our knowledge has been put effectively into operation; but we have developed no conscious plan or system in a large way for securing this result. It is the ultimate problem of the race to devise a permanent We deplore the relative decrease in the exportation of agricultural produce, and seem to think that the more we export the richer we become; but, if our knowledge is correct, under present systems of farming, the more we send abroad the sooner do we deplete our soils. We properly remove phosphate lands from exploitation and monopoly, but we may remove our phosphates more rapidly by sending our produce in unhindered quantities to Europe. Of course, I am not arguing against exportation and trade, but I wish to point out a fallacy in our common economic speech. The best husbandry is not in the new regions The best agriculture, considered in reference to the permanency of its results, develops in old regions, where the skinning process has passed, where the hide has been sold, and where people come back to utilize what is left. The skinning process is proceeding at this minute in the bountiful new lands of the United States; and in parts of the older States, and even also in parts of the newer ones, not only the skin but the tallow has been sold. There are "abandoned" farms from California even unto Maine. It is persistently said that the old eastern States are worn out, and that the farming in them is wretched. There is reason enough to be ashamed of eastern agriculture, and I hope that our newer regions will not repeat the mistakes of the older States; but the eastern States have most excellent agriculture, more than we are aware. Much of it is very profitable, fully as profitable as any I have seen in the great agricultural West. The acre-efficiency, as indicated by the Twelfth Census, is greatest in the old eastern States. Considered with reference to maintaining high fertility and utilizing wastes, I have not seen better fanning in this country than in many examples east of Buffalo. In the development of our agricultural wealth, the East as well as the West must be reckoned with. We cannot expect to develop widespread self-sustaining systems of farming in the East so long as it must compete with the soil-mining of the West. We are always seeking growing-room, and we have found it. But now, the western civilization has met the eastern, and the world is circumferenced. We shall develop the tropics and push far toward the poles; but we have now fairly discovered the island that we call the earth (within a year and a half we have reached one end of it and all but reached the other), and we must begin to make the most of it. Another philosophy of agriculture Practically all our agriculture has been developed on a rainfall basis. There is ancient irrigation experience, to be sure, but the great agriculture has been growing away from these regions. Agriculture Even in heavy rainfall countries, there is often such vast waste of water from run-off that the lands suffer severely during droughts. The hilly lands of our best farming regions are greatly reduced in their crop-producing power because people do not prepare against drought as consciously as they provide against winter. It is often said that we shall water eastern lands by irrigation, and I think that we shall; but our first obligation is to save the rainfall water by some system of farm-management or dry-farming. The irrigation and dry-farming developments have a significance beyond their value in the raising of crops; they are making the people to be conservators of water, and to have a real care for posterity. Agriculture rests on the saving of water. (Applause) The obligation of the farmer The farmer is rapidly beginning to realize his obligation to society. It is usual to say that the farmer feeds the world, but the larger fact is that he saves the world. The economic system depends on him. Wall Street watches the crops. As cities increase proportionately in population, the farmer assumes larger relative importance and becomes more and more a marked man. Careful and scientific husbandry is rising in this new country. We have come to a realization of the fact that our resources are not unlimited. The mining of fertilizing materials for transportation to a few spots on the earth will some day cease. We must make the farm sustain itself, at the same time that it provides the supplies for mankind. We all recognize the necessity of the other great occupations to a well developed civilization; but in the nature of the case, the farmer is the final support. On him depends the existence of the race. No method of chemical synthesis can provide us with the materials of food and clothing and shelter, and with all the good luxuries that spring from the bosom of the earth. I know of no better present conservators than our best farmers. They feel their responsibility. Quite the ideal of Conservation is illustrated by a farmer of my acquaintance who saves every product of his land and has developed a system of self-maintaining live-stock husbandry, who has harnessed his small stream to light his premises and do much of his work, who turns his drainage waters into household The obligation of the Conservation movement What I have meant to emphasize is the fact that the farmer is the ultimate conservator of the resources of the earth. He is near the cradle of supplies, near the sources of the streams, next the margin of the forests, and on the hills and in the valleys and on the plains just where the resources lie. He is in contact with the original and raw materials, and with the fundamental necessities. Any plan of Conservation that overlooks this fact cannot meet the situation. The Conservation movement must help the farmer to keep and save the race. The Conservation and Country Life movements will pass through propagandic, economic, and political phases; but they will eventuate into a new alignment of human forces and a redirection of the processes of social development. These results are to be brought about by efforts proceeding along definite lines of action. The Conservation movement is rapidly becoming crystallized into definite proposals. The Country Life movement should be solidified through a definite National organization or commission, that is continuously active. This body should work through all existing rural organizations, placing before them for consideration the specific questions of the day and serving as a clearing-house of discussions that arise in the societies and with the people; and it should make real investigation into the actual economic and social conditions of the open country, with a view to pointing out the specific practical steps to be taken by National, State, local, and individual enterprise. The Commission on Country Life made sufficient specific recommendations and suggestions to start a fundamental redirection of effort as applied to rural development. The Report of the Commission will naturally be the diverging-point of future discussions of country-life problems. (Applause) Chairman Clapp—Ladies and Gentlemen: The hour grows late, and the Congress will stand adjourned for the day. |
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