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

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

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

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

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

I am no less glad to respond to the cordial greeting of the Governor of Missouri, a state of magnificent resources of soil, in mineral wealth of several kinds, and in climate. As "no man liveth to himself," no state liveth to itself; but Missouri could better afford to be fenced

off by itself than any other state in the Union. It could feed itself, clothe itself and enjoy itself, and all from its own resources in field, forest and mine, "without the aid or consent of any other nation on the face of the earth." Its Governor and its citizens may well be proud of its advance in educational lines and in the development of its many and varied resources. Kansas City, Missouri, is therefore a fitting place for the conservationists of the United States to meet and discuss the greatest of all present problems; how to conserve the greatest of the resources of the Nation, the fertility of the soil and the life of the people who live in the open country. I am sure I voice the sentiment of this Congress as a whole when I return its most heartfelt thanks and full appreciation of the hearty welcome given by the Mayor of Kansas City, the President of its Commercial Club, and the Governor of the State of Missouri.

THE DRIFT OF POPULATION.

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

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

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

The growth of large cities has ceased to be in the business or even in the old residence sections, and is entirely in the suburbs. The same holds true abroad. According to the census for 1909, London in the ten

years previous increased about three-quarters of a million. Yet the population of the old town, "Old Londontown," decreased very heavily; the administrative district just outside that did not quite hold its own; and the entire growth and twenty thousand more was made in the outer circle or the suburbs. If men cannot have country life in the country, they are constantly aiming at "rus in urbe," in other words, to get as much as possible of the country in the city.

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

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

THE MOVEMENT TO THE CITY.

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

I regard it as important that you should understand as clearly as possible the conditions that have caused this world-wide movement from

the farm to the city, as only in this way shall we be able to foresee and describe the conditions that will cause and are even now causing a return flow or movement back toward the land.

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

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CORPORATION.

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

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

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

With corn at from 20 to 25 cents, wheat 50 cents, oats 15 cents, the

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

THE EVOLUTION OF MACHINERY.

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

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

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