Most of them

condition there. Is that true? "Well, we suppose it is. are doing better in the city than they did on the farm." I said, "They are wise boys then, to go where they can do better." I would advise anybody to do that. The statistics of agriculture in the New England states show that between 1880 and 1900, a twenty-year period, there was a decrease of 30.1 per cent in the area of improved farm land in New England, a decrease of one-third practically. During the period of 1890 to 1900, there was a decrease of 10 per cent in the rural population in New England as a whole. Since that time there has been a decrease in the rural population of practically all of the states north of the cotton belt and east of the great plains.

SOME STARTLING CONDITIONS.

During the last ten years there was a heavy decrease in the rural population of the state of Missouri, which I claim as my birthplace. Why is that? There are several reasons. One is that farmers are using more farm machinery today than they used to use, and they do not need as many men to man the farms as they formerly needed. Another reason is, many of the farms are not as well managed now as they were before because of the scarcity of labor, and they are not so profitable. But on the whole farms are more profitable now than they were ten years ago. There has been a ten per cent increase in the yield of farm crops in the United States in the last ten years. These conditions have brought about a movement which we have heard a great deal of in the papers recently, the back to the farm movement. Now, I am a farmer myself. I own a beautiful little farm down in the southwest corner of this state. I expect to be there next week picking my seed corn, and I am in full sympathy with every effort to develop agriculture and to improve the lot of the farmer, but I am not in sympathy with the efforts to make a wholesale migration of city people to the farm. I do not believe that is the solution of the question. In the first place we have on the farms of this country already children growing up who are getting the proper training to be farmers, aside from the schools they go to. Unfortunately our country schools teach them everything except farming. And as far as the farm experience is concerned those are the people. who ought to be our farmers of the future. The city man has too much to learn. It takes too long to get adjusted when he goes to the land. We have recently made a careful study of several hundred city men who have gone out to settle on ten and twenty-acre farm tracts. And I want to say unreservedly that these men have made failures as farmers, and practically every one of them has his farm for sale at less than he paid for it. There are a few exceptions to that, but they are mighty few. I believe the solution of the problem of populating our farms is to keep a proper proportion of our farm boys and girls on the farm. (Applause) I wouldn't keep all of them on the farm. Why? Because they are not needed there. If they were all kept on the farm, in a short while

there would be overproduction in agricultural products in this country. I want to see enough of them, and some of the very best of them, kept to man the farms in this country, and at the same time I want to see a small proportion, the proper proportion of those young men do what they have always done, go to the city and take the lead in every line of human activity. (Applause) I one time made the assertion before a body of scientists that there was something in the life of the farm that had a higher pedagogical value, higher educational value than the best city schools had to give. (Applause) I was called down hard for that statement, by a city scientist. Then I went to work to find out whether I was correct. I looked up the history of the Presidents of the United States, and I found that 92 per cent of them were born and raised on the farm; there are only 36 per cent of our population live on the farm—a little more than their share of presidents. Then I wrote letters to the governors of every state in this Union asking them if they were brought up on the farm; 91.4 per cent of them wrote back and said that they were farmer boys. Why is it that farmer boys become governors? It is because of something in their early training. We know it cannot be the country school, because that is a thing to speak of with a blush, generally speaking. What is it then? I asked those men. I said, "If the country life is advantageous to the growing boy, tell me why you think it is." President Lucien Tuttle, of the Boston & Maine Railway. New England, gave me this answer-(which seemed to be the answer that most of them gave)—"When I was a boy on the farm by the time I was 12 years of age I was buying and selling cattle and feeding stock and taking care of them. I learned a sense of responsibility, and I never forgot it."

I believe that the opportunity of putting responsibility on the farm boy is the most important feature of his education. I am confident that is correct. (Applause) We want a proper proportion of the farm boys and farm girls to remain on the farm and become farmers that are a credit to the Nation.

THE INCREASE IN LAND VALUES.

Let me tell you another reason why I want that rather than see city people go to the land. Land is going to become high-priced in this country in the very near future. The value of the land in the United States in the last ten years increased from twenty billion dollars to forty billion dollars. What made that? Was it increase in income from the land? No. Was it increase in the intrinsic value of that land for farming purposes? No. It was increase in the demand and decrease in the supply of free land. That is what did it. We only have to go across the Atlantic ocean to find farm land selling at from two to six hundred dollars an acre. Why? Why? Because it is comparatively limited. There is no free land for sale. As long as a man could homestead 160 acres of

good land in Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, no farm land in America could be worth more than $100 per acre. But that day has past. We are now to have high-priced land. I want to see the boys who inherit that land live on it and run it. (Applause) I would much rather see that than to see the boy who owns that farm, or will own it, go to the city and become a street car driver and rent his farm to some fellow who will become a tenant. I want to see the American farms, so far as possible, peopled by those who own the land, who can hold up their heads and look any man in the face and say, "I am a landed proprietor, a free born citizen. in a free land," a thing which the tenant farmer can't always do.

A Delegate-How to keep the boys on the farm is what we want to know.

Prof. SPILLMAN-That is what I was coming to in just a minute. Let me tell you what I have to say on that subject. There are lots of men in this audience that have left the farm. Why did you leave it? Because you thought you could do better, didn't you?

A Delegate-Exactly.

Prof. SPILLMAN-That is it. Now, let us face the thing as it is. You left the farm because you thought you could do better elsewhere. Now, there is only one way to keep a sensible young man on the farm. You can keep a blockhead there perhaps some other way, but a sensible young man can be kept there in only one way, and that is to make it advantageous for him to stay there. You insult his intelligence when you ask him to stay at a disadvantage. (Applause) How are we going to make it advantageous for that boy to stay there? Well, I think I know how that can be done. We have tremendous agencies in this country at work learning how farming ought to be done. We have agricultural colleges, teaching young men, but one thing I want to impress upon you is that in order for the agricultural college to reach and affect every farmer in America, it would be necessary to graduate every year in agriculture alone 4,000 men in every college in the country. You know that they cannot reach that, and the function of the agricultural college is to prepare leaders and teachers and as many farmers as possible, but not all farmers.

The agricultural college of Kansas cannot graduate 4,000 men a year in agriculture. Kansas is a pretty liberal state in the matter of education, but I do not think she would want to go into her pocket deep enough to provide educational factilities at Manhattan for that many men. I would like to see her do it, but I do not think she can. Now, we must reach the farmer in other ways. These institutions have learned a tremendous amount. They have discovered the principles in fertilization of the soil; they have worked out thoroughly the principles of feeding live stock, so that today it is practically reduced to an exact science.

They have worked out methods of selecting seed corn. How many farmers in Missouri plant carefully prepared seed corn? You ought to do it. I have just two minutes to tell you the gist of the scheme.

The President of the United States the other night told you that he was willing to approve the appropriation of a million dollars to begin a work of carrying to the farmer what the scientists already know. Let me add to that, that some of the most important work these men are to do will be to carry to those farmers what that farmer knows. I know farmers at whose feet I would be willing to sit for weeks, and I have done so, and I have learned more from the men whose farms I have studied than I ever learned from anybody else. But those men had worked out the methods of putting into practice what the agricultural scientist knows. We propose to put in every county in the United States a man to carry on an investigation of the work of the successful farmers and find out how they do it. A man who will investigate local agricultural problems and become an agricultural adviser of the farmers in these counties. (Applause) We are going to take the best men we can get. Most of them will be men who cannot afford to take the positions, men who are already making more than $1,500 or $2,000 a year on their own farms. Most of them will be young men, and the others, who, if they were a little older, would be doing the same thing. Now, my time is up, and I just want to add in ten seconds that we propose to join the state and the county and all divide the expense of establishing this system all over the United States for you.

President WALLACE-I will now introduce to you, and it gives me great pleasure, Mrs. E. R. Weeks of the National Congress of Mothers and Parent Teachers' Association, who will speak to you for five minutes only. (Applause)

Mrs. WEEKS-I told you to make it three minutes.

The National Congress of Mothers reports here, not because it has a committee on conservation, but because it is an association organized for conservation, the conservation of the home and the child.

When we gave the call for our first convention in 1897 a whirlwind of protest swept over the land, that mothers should be called from their homes and children to attend a convention, and the press, from one end of the land to the other, ridiculed us as a lot of old maids and childless married women.

Today the press is our best friend, and we have taught the world. that a mother can not live for her home and children in the best way unless she takes into her thought and work all other homes and children. The wives and daughters of the land have learned through us that a woman's duty lies along the avenues by which she may bring into the home the best from the outside world. We conserve the home and child by our work in promoting the creation of juvenile courts, both in this country and abroad, and by sending to this convention as delegates

our chairman of that committee, Judge Benjamin Lindsey. We organize parents' and teachers' meetings in city and rural schools, and to make these meetings possible we have a committee on good roads for country children's welfare.

As a conservation congress for child welfare, we offer you, gentlemen, our experience and our organization in any efforts which you may put forth for the betterment of childhood whether in city or country. (Applause)

President WALLACE-I take pleasure in introducing to you Congressman Fred S. Jackson, former Attorney General of Kansas.

MR. JACKSON-As soils may be exhausted, it is even possible to exhaust the conservation of soils-by discussion. We have listened to several papers, each of which has been not only intensely interesting but exhaustive on the subject of restoring and conserving exhausted soils. I may be pardoned, therefore, in asking your attention to another great national subject of conservation; that of conserving our lives and millions of property from loss by fire. This subject has been already partially discussed, before this Congress, through and by means of a report of the National Board of Fire Underwriters, a national organization of fire insurance companies.

This report, though good in the main, is one-sided. It calls attention to the public duty of citizens in general in preventing fire losses. We desire by means of a national investigation under national supervision to remind insurance companies of certain of their own public duties, relative to the causes of fire losses.

All agree that these losses are enormous and when compared with that of any other country are excessive and abnormal. In the last decade the amount of property insured has doubled and in spite of a campaign for fire prevention by the insurance companies, fire losses have also doubled.

This disappointing result has led many of the best informed insurance experts of the country to conclude that the real "bug under the chip" in our fast increasing excessive and abnormal fire losses is the insurance rate, for which our insurance companies are responsible.

I hold no brief in this matter against the insurance companies. I became interested in the subject merely as a state officer in an attempt to enforce state laws and to secure state supervision of rates in the interest of the public. Such laws are now in force in at least four states of the Union, and are sustained by our courts on the theory of the state's right to protect the life and property of the citizens against loss from fire.

POWELL EVANS' VIEWS.

The importance of this subject has not been better or more strongly stated than by Mr. Powell Evans, of Philadelphia, one of the leading