occasions wait, the interest felt by millions who look to it for information and guidance, prove how deep beneath the surface lie the sources. of its existence and its influence. Out of the Conservation movement in its practical application to our common life may come wealth greater than could be won by the overthrow of kingdoms and the annexation of provinces; National prestige and individual well-being: the gift of broader mental horizons; and, best and most necessary of all, the quality of a National citizenship which has learned to rule its own spirit and to rise by the control of its own desires. (Great applause)

One among the

Chairman CLAPP-Ladies and Gentlemen: 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 be 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

of wheat to the acre while we grow 13 (applause)—and by means of our phosphates. Using the language of the President the other day to outline the management of these resources (and he has done it better than any other man I ever knew), we can lease the lands, we can control them, we can prescribe how they shall be used. This much we all agree upon. And we will further agree that the Congress of the United States, our Representatives, must decide how it shall be done.

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 wentto 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 barrel if you had enough headway. We have been absolutely throwing away our resources-just like some of our wealthy gentlemen down in New York throw their daughters in the face of titled Nobodies asking them to take them "with the compliments of the author" (laughter). If this country continues to be governed, as it has been governed for the last twenty years, by great combinations of capital that get together in Congress or out of Congress to determine how much tariff they will levy and what else they may do in the way of getting hold of the public domain, it doesn't make a speck of difference whether our resources are governed by the Government or by the States; they will all be stolen anyhow (laughter and cheers, and cries of "Hit him again!")—just as they have been in the past. (Renewed applause)

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 foursquare 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

in the cities can afford to pay. It is the biggest problem before us. It involves all other problems, when you come to trace it down to its roots. The farmer is handicapped by the fact that he no longer tills virgin soil, as his father and his grandfather did, and by the fact that he no longer has timber at his door. We have wasted our magnificent forests of oak and walnut, and given away an empire (for example, in Wisconsin) of the best pine lands that some fellows would put a road through, to get the lumber out under pretense of resisting a Canadian invasion (laughter and applause). Today we are buying fertilizers for all New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, southern Indiana, all the South, and even for Missouri; it is only a question of time when we shall have to buy them for all our land. Notwithstanding all of the millions of acres that have been put into cultivation every year, our crop production lags behind our population. In the last ten or fifteen years, our production of wheat per acre gradually but slowly decreased until within the last three or four years, when with my friend Secretary Wilson's help we began to do a little better.

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

than two-thirds (Voice: "If he gets that"); frequently he gets onethird. Out in Fresno, California, we found they made a first-class rate at four cents on what I was paying sixteen cents for; the railroad got four cents, the wholesaler four, the retailer four, and the farmer four-and I pay sixteen. And there is another trouble (I am one of the unfortunates so I look at both sides of the question): the farmer in town pays 16 percent, so the merchants tell me, for the privilege of ordering goods by telephone instead of going to the market and getting them; and that is another reason he has to pay so much. But there is still another matter with the city man; it is not so much the high cost of living as the cost of high living and prosperous times (I borrowed that from Mr Hill); for the man in town now isn't satisfied to live as his father did, or his grandfather, or as he himself did ten or twenty years ago (applause). Why, he wants strawberries from Texas in February, and he wants green peas from Florida, and he wants fresh eggs at the time when hens don't lay, and he wants spring chicken in the coldest weather-and he gets it, but it comes out of cold storage (laughter). That is one reason why the townsman cannot get farmer's products at the price he can afford to pay.

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