is largely due to the fact that the National Government does not keep
within their banks the waters of its navigable rivers. During the course
of the last ten years, the National Government has spent 125 millions
of dollars to put water on to three and one-half millions of arid lands
in the West. I am confident that there is no one present here today who
objects to the policy that has been followed by our National Government
for the reclamation of the arid lands of the West by the conservation of
our waters for the purpose of irrigation. Though mistakes may have been
made in isolated cases, the general policy meets with national approval.
But I feel that the time will come; in fact, I believe it has come, when
the national government should be willing to spend at least a small
portion of the money that it uses to put water on the arid lands of the
West to keep the water of its navigable rivers off of the rich lowlands
of the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers. It takes an expense of from
$25 to $40 an acre to put water on to the arid lands of the West, and yet
it is the estimate of engineers that by an expense of not to exceed $5.00
an acre the water of the navigable rivers can be kept off of the lowlands
adjacent thereto.
This question is of importance not only to the people of Missouri, but
to the people of the entire country. There are in the Mississippi and
Missouri river valleys over 20 millions of acres of the richest lands
in the world, which are now impaired for the purpose of cultivation by
reason of swamps and overflows. If this land were reclaimed and made to
yield a certain annual harvest, it would almost double the agricultural
production of the Mississippi Valley. And the reason why it is not so
productive is, as I have said, because the national government does not
keep the waters of its navigable rivers within their banks. By doing so
the reclamation of this swamp and flooded land would not only be made
possible, but by such a policy our navigable rivers would be improved and
made more dependable as a means of inland transportation. And it little
profits us to increase the production of our fertile fields unless that
production can be carried from the farms to the market in such a way and
for such a charge as will adequately compensate for the labor thereby
expended.
And if the principles of conservation were given a practical and
effective application in improving our rivers by the keeping of their
waters within their banks, by using in a proper and a scientific way our
uncultivated soil, the railroads would be unequal to the task of carrying
such an immensely increased agricultural production from the farm to
the market. Then the question of water transportation would become a
necessity and, in my judgment, a satisfactory progress in the improvement
of our inland waterways for the purposes of transportation will not be
made until our agricultural production is increased to such an extent
that existing railroads are unequal to its transportation.
THE PROBLEM OF ADEQUATE PRODUCTION.
I have outlined to you, in a most general way, some of the important
phases of the question of conservation which find a practical
application to the conditions existing today in the State of Missouri.
Experts tell us that over 40 per cent of our farm lands are being
cultivated in a way which tends to decrease, rather than to increase,
their productivity. Such a policy must inevitably result in the
impoverishment of the Nation; because when you destroy the productivity
of the soil, then do you strike at the very foundation of national
prosperity and happiness. Agriculture, the oldest of occupations, is
clearly the most important. The value of that which is produced from the
soil exceeds the value of all other products of human labor. Up to the
present time in this country, we have been peculiarly fortunate in that
our production has exceeded consumption and the supply has always been
greater than the demand. The result has been that the American people
alone, of all the people of the world, have eaten the same kind of food.
And no stronger influence could exist as against the creation of classes
and castes in our population than for all of the people to eat the same
kind of food.
But with the consumption increasing more rapidly than production, and
the consequent increase in the cost of the necessities of life, there
shall come a time when many will not be able to secure the same kind of
food that is enjoyed by others. Then will there come a disturbing and
dangerous influence which will threaten our society and our institutions.
Statistics tell us of a constantly decreasing surplus of production. Our
balance of trade is rapidly becoming confined to the exports of cotton.
And if the present tendency continues, in a few years we will consume
all of the products of our grain and of our live stock and have none to
sell in other lands. And when this condition is followed by a time that
it will be necessary to import the necessities of life, then will exist
conditions which will be the cause of concern, as well as a reflection
upon the American people for their capacity to use in a proper manner the
great natural resources with which nature has endowed them.
I feel, however, that the American people have demonstrated most
impressively their capacity for self-government by the effective manner
in which they have taken up this important question of conservation. Ten
years ago, the term was hardly known outside of the laboratory of the
scientist and the class-room of the agricultural college. Today it is
almost a household term. Under the inspiring leadership of that great
American, Theodore Roosevelt, the American people have taken up the
consideration and the practical application of this important national
policy. And this splendid Congress today, assembled in this progressive
and developing city, is an evidence of the fact that the interest in this
question is by no means subsiding.
I welcome you to Missouri and voice the sentiment of her people when I
say we hope that your deliberations and discussions will contribute to
the practical and effective application of that great public policy that
you are gathered here to consider.
President WALLACE—This is a right good looking audience. We want it to go
down in history, and if you will just be quiet, we will have a flashlight
picture taken before I respond to this eloquent address to which you have
just listened.
[After the flash light picture was taken the Congress proceeded.]
President WALLACE—I assure you that it is a great privilege as well as
pleasure to respond in behalf of this Congress to the cordial address
of welcome of the Governor of the great State of Missouri, the Mayor of
Kansas City and the President of the Commercial Club. The people of the
West generally know Kansas City only as they see it from the stations,
and have no proper conception of the magnificence of its buildings, the
beauty of its streets and surroundings, and still less of the remarkable
enterprise of its citizens. I confess that all this was a great surprise
to me on a recent visit here.
The real greatness of your city lies in the agricultural resources. With
the great State of Kansas on the west, with the great State of Missouri
on the east, with Oklahoma and Arkansas with their undeveloped resources
on the south, its future greatness must be largely measured by the
development of agriculture in these great states, in the great corn state
lying farther north and in the great cotton states farther south. Kansas
City can lay its hand on more possible agricultural wealth than any other
city on the map of the United States. Hence it was early recognized by
the officers of this Congress as the best possible place to inaugurate
a campaign for better farming, better business and better living on the
farm.
The actual prosperity of any city is largely measured by the foresight,
the breadth of vision and energy of its commercial club. A modern city
may have vast resources; it may have a form of government almost ideal;
and that government may be acceptable to the people and free from any
breath of scandal; but if it does not have an organization of its ablest
and best business men, who can make a careful study of these resources,
who work together—and that, too, often at great personal and pecuniary
sacrifice—for the good of the city as a whole, these resources are
likely to remain undeveloped. The citizens of your city and the whole
state may well be proud of your Commercial Club. Its members are the
eyes through which the citizen sees the possible, and the hands through
which the possible becomes the actual. They are the ears that recognize
the unspoken needs and aspirations of the busy masses, and the voice
that gives them authoritative expression. Without an active Commercial
Club, such as you have, in which the masses of the city have perfect
confidence, you could not realize your possibilities.
I am no less glad to respond to the cordial greeting of the Governor of
Missouri, a state of magnificent resources of soil, in mineral wealth
of several kinds, and in climate. As “no man liveth to himself,” no
state liveth to itself; but Missouri could better afford to be fenced
off by itself than any other state in the Union. It could feed itself,
clothe itself and enjoy itself, and all from its own resources in field,
forest and mine, “without the aid or consent of any other nation on the
face of the earth.” Its Governor and its citizens may well be proud of
its advance in educational lines and in the development of its many and
varied resources. Kansas City, Missouri, is therefore a fitting place
for the conservationists of the United States to meet and discuss the
greatest of all present problems; how to conserve the greatest of the
resources of the Nation, the fertility of the soil and the life of the
people who live in the open country. I am sure I voice the sentiment of
this Congress as a whole when I return its most heartfelt thanks and full
appreciation of the hearty welcome given by the Mayor of Kansas City,
the President of its Commercial Club, and the Governor of the State of
Missouri.
THE DRIFT OF POPULATION.
It will be my object in this address not to discuss any phase of the
conservation movement exhaustively, but to outline briefly two drifts of
population: the drift from the farm to the city and the drift from the
city toward the land, and the work of this Congress as related thereto.
Even before the daily press had begun the crusade “back to the land,” the
movement toward the land had already set in. When Oklahoma was opened to
settlement the land seekers stood, serried ranks of horsemen, waiting for
the signal gun; and that great state of undulating prairie, heretofore
only a great pasture, was converted in a few weeks into a state of farm
homes. Congress did not dare to repeat the experiment; but when other
Indian reservations were opened, provided for the distribution of land by
lot, giving the prize to the lucky man rather than to the one with the
swiftest horse and most accurate knowledge of the country. Every opening
since reveals the fact that only one in a few can gain the coveted prize,
so great is the land hunger of the American people.
This land hunger is not peculiar to any class of people nor to any state.
The merchant, the banker, the railroad official of New York and Boston,
each longs for a farm, possibly only as a summer home, but is willing to
pay for it in investment, in improvements and cost of management, more
than it is worth in dollars or ever will be. He, too, is bitten by land
hunger. Many small business men of our cities, who cannot hope to secure
a farm and live on it, invest greedily in acreage in the suburbs. The
workman in the factory aims to secure two or three acres on which he can
build himself a home, have a garden or cow pasture or place for poultry,
or at least a playground for his children.
The growth of large cities has ceased to be in the business or even in
the old residence sections, and is entirely in the suburbs. The same
holds true abroad. According to the census for 1909, London in the ten
years previous increased about three-quarters of a million. Yet the
population of the old town, “Old Londontown,” decreased very heavily; the
administrative district just outside that did not quite hold its own; and
the entire growth and twenty thousand more was made in the outer circle
or the suburbs. If men cannot have country life in the country, they are
constantly aiming at “_rus in urbe_,” in other words, to get as much as
possible of the country in the city.
As interurbans stretch out from the cities, farm after farm on their
lines is divided up into acreage; and thus while the steam railroads
tend to concentrate population, as they have from the beginning, the
trolley lines tend to lure the people back toward the country. Even our
foreign population, the men who dig our coal, mine our ores and swelter
in our furnaces, aim to have a few acres which they can call their own,
where they may live cheaply and die in peace and quiet, when the great
interests have used up their best days and cast them off.
In fact, latent in the heart of nearly every man, be he man of business,
clerk or other employe, or laboring with his hands, there is a yearning
desire to have a piece of land to call his own. Perhaps they do not
consciously reason it out. It may be a revival of the instinct of the
primitive man, or it may be an instinctive fear of industrial wrath to
come and a feeling that, should it come, should our whole industrial
system be shaken to its very foundation, the family that has a few acres
of its own can at least live in comparative comfort and safety.
THE MOVEMENT TO THE CITY.
Alongside of this movement, back toward, if not always to the farm, the
counter-movement from the farm to the town, which has been going on for
fifty years, continues with increasing and accelerated force. Farmers all
over the older West move in great numbers or retire to the country towns;
and notwithstanding all this constant influx of population, these towns,
as the late census reveals, have barely held their own and often have
lost population, the natural increase of the towns themselves pouring
into the larger towns and cities, in which the majority live with less
comfort than the farmers who remain on their farms. Vast numbers of boys
and girls fall a prey to the alluring vices of the city; and many of them
eventually take their places with “the down and out.” Comparatively few
succeed and become well-to-do. The children of these few become wealthy;
their grandchildren usually spend gaily the fortunes they never earned;
and naturally the family dies out, at least, so far as force and power
are concerned, in another generation or at most two or three. The city
uses up men and families as it uses up horses. And this is true not only
in this, but in the older countries as well. All Ireland, for example,
except Dublin and Belfast, has lost population in the last ten years, as
has also nearly all of Wales and Scotland.
I regard it as important that you should understand as clearly as
possible the conditions that have caused this world-wide movement from
the farm to the city, as only in this way shall we be able to foresee
and describe the conditions that will cause and are even now causing a
return flow or movement back toward the land.
This movement townward began with the use of improved machinery, or
the application of science to the operations of manufacturing and
distributing the things necessary for the supply of our ever-increasing
human wants. It has increased in proportion to the success of the
inventions and discoveries. The power loom put all other looms out of
business. The spinning jenny sent the spinning wheel to the attic. The
small industries—the wagon shops, the blacksmith shops, the grist mills
and carding mills found in and around the county seats and smaller towns
fifty years ago—“folded their tents like the Arab and silently stole
away,” when it was found that a large plant and improved machinery,
coupled with transportation facilities, could supply human wants at less
cost.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CORPORATION.
What followed? Large capital was required for the larger plants.
The individual gave place to the firm; the firm eventually became a
corporation, and finally a trust. At last the workman could no longer
own his own tools, and became an employe. Large numbers of employes
were soon necessary, and for self-protection they formed the union. The
organization of labor followed logically the organization of capital and
gave us one of the greatest and most difficult of modern problems, that
of labor unions.
In the factory we no longer aim to supply local demands, but state,
interstate, national and even international. For this there must be
transportation, and therefore we have now a railroad problem closely
intertwined with the labor problem, intimately connected with the whole
process of manufacturing and distribution. The products of these great
factories must be used by consumers living at long distances. Hence we
have the problem of distribution, or the problem of the middleman, and
all the direct results of the application of science to industry. Since
the world began the like has never been seen before. We have gone into
this troubled sea without chart or compass. Problems are evolved, for the
solution of which we have neither precedent nor guide.
While all this was going on, an empire of virgin soil, the counterpart
of which exists in such mass nowhere else in the world, was opened for
immediate settlement, and that settlement was powerfully stimulated
by the homestead law and immense railroad grants. As a result the Old
World and the New were literally sluched with food for man and beast at
the bare cost of mining the soil fertility, the storage of unnumbered
centuries. Had this Mississippi Valley been covered with forests like
Pennsylvania and Ohio, and opened slowly as the world needed food, our
history would have been written differently, and the problems to be met
would have been of an entirely different character.
With corn at from 20 to 25 cents, wheat 50 cents, oats 15 cents, the
manufacturer could afford to pay higher wages than the farmer and give
shorter hours. The city could furnish plank walks, then cement, paved
streets, light, amusement, society—the joy of living. Is it any wonder
that the farm boy and girls fled to the cities, away from the old-time
isolation of the farm, from bad roads, from lack of society, when offered
better pay and shorter hours? Better pay; shorter hours; larger life;
amusements for all, whatever their tastes might be; what boy or girl
could resist all this?
THE EVOLUTION OF MACHINERY.
The farm itself finally began to use improved machinery. The farmer hung
his scythe in a tree and bought a mower; hung up his cradle and bought
a binder. He used more horses, better tools, and grew more crops with
less than half the labor. All this was natural, logical, inevitable.
The older farming sections do not have so dense a population as of old,
simply because they do not need it as they did when farming under old
conditions. They could not use it with profit when they had to compete
with town wages and town hours.
What then followed? Inevitably, soil impoverishment. The nineteenth
century farmer was, speaking generally, no farmer at all, but a miner, a
soil robber. There was a good farmer here and there, a good settlement
here and there; but, speaking generally, there was no farming, nothing
but mining. The nineteenth century farmer sold the stored fertility of
ages at the bare cost of mining it. With his gang-plow and his four to
eight-section harrow, he could do more soil robbing in five years than
his grandfather could do in his whole lifetime. The evidence of it:
The now general use of commercial fertilizers from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, which means that the farmer of today is paying good round sums
for the fertility his father literally gave away; and the disappearance
of crops which grow during a short season, and therefore must have
fertile land. Our flax crop, for instance, is now disappearing up into
Canada, spring wheat closely following, and our oats crop preparing to
follow.
We are now nearing a point where we will need practically all our grains
to provide for the wants of our own population. Our export of corn is
merely a dribble; in our last census year 100 million bushels less than
the average ten years before. Our exports of meats and dairy products
have shrunk in ten years over 50 per cent. We sent abroad last year only
about one-third the number of cattle we sent ten years ago. There is not
the slightest indication that this decline will be checked. If checked at
all, it will be but temporarily, due to an industrial crisis. Were it not
for over 500 million dollars’ worth of cotton that we send abroad each
year, the country would be drained of its precious metals to settle our
foreign obligations, and we would be on the verge of national bankruptcy.
THE PRODUCTION PER ACRE.
Is it not amazing that, mainly since our Declaration of Independence, 135
years ago, we have been able to so waste our fertility that we produce
less wheat per acre than any people of the Eastern Hemisphere, except
Russia and India? Lands in England that have been farmed for more than
a thousand years produce more than twice as much wheat per acre on the
average as we do in the naturally better lands of the Mississippi Valley.
That demonstrates the difference between farming and merely mining the
soil fertility.
This condition has been greatly hastened by our statesmen. The gift of an
empire of land to railroads to enable them to furnish speedy and cheap
transportation for a vast continent, together with the enactment of the
homestead law, so excessively stimulated agricultural production that the
farmer was often, and in fact generally until about twelve years ago,
forced to sell his products at and often under the cost of production.
This gave the world cheaper food than it will ever see again, and made
possible the wonderful growth of great cities the world over.
The anxiety of the farmer to find a home market instead of having his
prices fixed in a foreign market under competition led to the continuance
of the system of high tariffs long after the reason for it had ceased to
exist, thus wonderfully stimulating the growth of the cities of our own
land, cities which with all our boasted ability we have never been able
to govern decently. When this undue stimulus is removed, as it will and
must be sooner or later, our manufacturers will have to take the same
medicine which sickened the farmers in the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s.
Inasmuch as there are no more Mississippi valleys to be opened, we are
now nearing the turning of the lane. We must from henceforth learn how to
farm. We cannot greatly increase our acreage; will, in fact, be compelled
by the return of normal climatic conditions over our western territory
to reduce it. The only thing left to do is to grow more grain per acre,
better stock in greater numbers per quarter section. Only in this way can
we reduce the cost of living.
HOW TO PRODUCE FOOD CHEAPLY.
Our great problem, as I said to this Congress a year ago, is how to
produce food for our own people at prices which they can afford to pay.
But how? Partly by putting more brains into our farming. There is a great
deal of agricultural labor wasted simply because many farmers do not
have even an elementary knowledge of the forces with which they have to
work. It is hard to convince them that the fertility of the soil is not
inexhaustible. Farmers of this class have been soil robbers too long, and
they continue to grow the same crop year after year, trusting to luck. It
is hard to get the farmers of this class to understand the philosophy
of crop rotation, of the natural movement of water in the soil, or of
the ideal seed-bed, or the fitness of certain soils for certain crops;
in short, of the requirements of plant or animal life, or to persuade
them to active coöperation with each other, or to get them in actual
touch and sympathy with the new agriculture. This is an educational
process, and therefore slow, even when there is a disposition to acquire
the knowledge. Many farmers have more faith in moon signs than in
agricultural colleges and experimental stations; more faith in ordinary
politicians than in college professors and scientists; more faith in
yellow journals than in the best agricultural papers.