value, most of which had developed during or soon after the war period. There is encouragement in the fact that some leading Members of Congress were not informed as to what was occurring but now realize that a serious mistake has been made and are ready to help correct it.

ESSENTIALS FOR RESEARCH.

Well-trained men and ample funds are the essentials for research. It should be a national policy to train and encourage in every way possible the right kind of men and women and to supply funds to meet their reasonable needs in research work in the interest of agriculture.

(2) Efforts should be made always to encourage young men and women, who have ability and inclination of the right kind, to prepare themselves for research work. Special scholarships and fellowships should be provided by the agricultural educational institutions to enable such persons to complete their fundamental training, and later assistant ships should be provided to bring them into helpful contact with older and well-trained investigators, and due credit should be allowed for their own efforts. As they advance in ability and in getting worth-while results, their compensation should be reasonably increased. Care should be taken to make this compensation as attractive as is provided for persons of corresponding ability and service in allied lines of work. Failure in this respect in recent years has resulted in heavy losses from the ranks of research workers in the Department of Agriculture and in State experiment stations. During a period of about six years, including the war, there was a change of nearly 80 per cent in the scientific personnel engaged in agricultural research throughout the country. Many of the younger men went into war service, but the greater losses to agricultural research came from the resignations of older men who took other more remunerative positions. The overturn has been exceedingly large since the war. On this account, and without reflection upon those who have continued in research work or who have recently gone into that work, it must be admitted that research today, instead of being the strongest link in the chain made up of research, college education, and extension work, is the weakest link. Research is the least able of the three to meet the demands it should care for.

Funds for the support of agricultural research as now available represent such a small percentage of the interests concerned that they are almost negligible by comparison. They represent a much smaller per cent of value of output than is so expended by many a manufacturing plant in the interest of its output.

(3) A principal requirement as to funds is assurance of permanent income. Without such assurance strong men can not be induced to prepare themselves adequately for research, nor can they be retained in this work. Too often it has been necessary to stop important experimental work because of failure to continue appropriations. No one can tell what losses have been suffered because important projects, after being conducted for an extended period. of time. had to be discontinued with the failure of appropriations before the final results had been secured.

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(4) As agricultural research relates in such large measure to national problems, and the work done in one State is of value in many States, and as agriculture is such a large factor in all business, it is right that national funds should be used in promoting agricultural research in the different States. A precedent has been furnished, and a national policy for agricultural research should provide for enlarging these national appropriations by small increments for a few years until they have reached amounts commensurate with present demands, as specified in the Purnell bill. This measure, or other similar relief, should be enacted as soon as possible. It is preferable from the standpoint of efficiency to make the appropriation with the fewest possible conditions, as are provided in the Hatch and Adams Acts, rather than to continue the requirement for offset funds, as provided in the Smith-Lever and Smith-Hughes Acts. As compared with the Federal Government, it seems that the States now are carrying their full share.

In considering appropriations for agricultural research it is well to remember that when our taxes are increased for this purpose our involuntary taxes, or those which are levied by powers beyond our control, are decreased many times more than the voluntary taxes are increased.

COOPERATION AND SUPERVISION.

(5) A national policy fostering agricultural research should provide for more definite and constructive cooperation by research. agencies than now obtains.

(6) It must provide also for certain supervision to assure the proper use of public funds, and this is expected and welcomed. A reasonable amount of cooperation and supervision is stimulating. An excess amount is deadening.

(7) A more definite agreement on the fields to be occupied by the Department of Agriculture on the one hand and by the State experiment stations on the other hand, with better coordination of work and a larger provision for joint effort, should form a part of the policy for further developing agricultural research. Such a definition of function and joint effort would guard against undesirable duplication and would result in better-directed efforts. Details should be worked out by representatives of the Secretary of Agriculture and the agricultural colleges, and when properly approved should form a fundamental law. Once each year this joint agreement should be considered by duly chosen representatives for the purpose of making it more perfect. Among other things, it should provide for the wise selection of projects for investigation and for inviting experiment stations in different States or the Federal Department of Agriculture to give attention to different phases of a project requiring investigation at different places. All projects should be briefly but clearly described and recorded in the Department of Agriculture at Washington, and all interested persons should be informed as to the kinds of work in progress. From time to time, at least once a year, the progress of each project should be officially reported and checked. When a project is undertaken, work on it should continue to a reasonable extent until it is finished or formally set aside, and care should be taken not to provide for starting new

projects for any laboratory or station when it has too many projects unfinished.

(8) While a national policy for agricultural research should not enter the details of local administration, it should encourage the types of organization which would be most efficient.

SHALL WE HAVE AMPLE AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH?

An effort has been made to suggest a picture of our country as it would be without properly supported agricultural research, and again with such research. If this work is properly developed, agriculture will continue on a permanent and profitable basis in the face of ever-increasing obstacles, and this Nation, with a strong agriculture, will continue to furnish its own great commodities which come from the farms and will profit further from large sales of the surplus in other countries. The time is ripe for stimulating a national policy for agricultural research which will contribute to this great end.

THE FARM WOMAN AND THE FARM HOME.

By Mrs. CHARLES W. SEWELL, of Indiana.

I realize that is very presumptuous for the farmer's wife to speak out in meeting. She has been supposed to do her full duty when she cared for the house, cooked the meals, washed the dishes and the clothes, took care of the babies, wiped their noses, spanked them occasionally and sent them off to school on time, but farm women have been invited here by Secretary Wallace and, as a member of the committee on farm population and farm home, we have worked long and hard to present to you a set of recommendations that you as a conference will be glad to adopt. I am wondering if you people have realized, as we think we have, that the heart of American agriculture to-day lies in the American farm home, and that not only the heart of American agriculture but the heart of this great big Nation itself, because there are so many influences at work at this time that seem to aim at the very vitals of this our most sacred institution. I want to give you some definitions of home as they are given in various parts of the country. Webster will tell you that the home is the place of one's abode. A little boy with a country home and mother was asked what home is. He said, "That's easy. Home is where your ma is." Another little boy who had neither country home or country mother said, "Home is a place where you change your clothes so you can go somewhere else." And as Abe Martin recently said: "Home has got to be a sort of a fillin' station in some localities where folks drop

in."

The last one I heard was about a young couple who were quarreling on a crowded city street, attracting much attention and quite a crowd had gathered. The man, who had a grain of self-respect left, said, "Oh, come on, shut up, and go home. What do you want to quarrel on the street for? What do you think you got a home for?"

So I hold that the American farm home contains much that must be preserved and we must do everything in our power here as an agricultural conference to uphold the dignity, ideals, and principles that have long been inculcated in the American farm home. You will have no American statesmen if you do not preserve the home because they say where the corn grows tall

Perhaps that is the reason that Iowa has produced so many Secretaries of Agriculture. I want you to realize, gentlemen, that back in the country districts all over the United States there are country women waiting to hear what you do here this afternoon because we farm women will have to keep up the morale of the farm men until some of these reforms which are so emphasized and so needed are put into motion. So we are urging that you recognize that the farmer's wife is his business partner as the wife of no other business man can possibly be. The man who has a shop or factory or office closes the door of his business when he goes home. His wife has not been there. She knows nothing about how it has gone with him. But the farmer's wife is an entirely different proposition. She lives in his factory, she washes for and boards the men that work in his shop. She knows if the cattle break into the growing corn. She drives them out and builds up the fence. She knows when the tractor runs dry by the looks on her husband's face when he comes in. The farm woman sees the storm sweep down over the prairie in the fall of the year and the city person would see only the fine growing crop and how many dollars it would bring if it was properly cared for and marketed. But the farm woman sees far more than that. She sees new linoleum for the kitchen floor, a new suit for the good man, a trip to the childhood home, or music lessons for the little daughter, or the first quarter's allowance for the education of the promising farm boy. But when the storm does çome, many times wiping out the work of the farmer for the entire season, she slips her hand in his and says "Never mind, we will weather it somehow." She is his partner. She is willing to go on and do all things that he wants done.

So I want to say to you that I am very grateful for this little recognition in this great audience because I represent not the wealthy people, but I come from 80 acres of land in Indiana, and I have been a tenant farmer's wife. I like to remember that Lincoln said "God must have loved the poor people because he made so many of them." The farmer's wife is perhaps that one who has walked across the plowed fields some wild winter night to help her sister in her hour of distress. She has taken in her arms and dressed that new-born babe.

In the eyes of city women she has perhaps so far forgotten her dignity that she knows how to harness horses and milk cows. She goes even farther than that-in the springtime of the year she will open the door of her clean country kitchen and carry in the baby lambs and pigs that they may be saved. After all, isn't she the woman who has really seen life?

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

By the SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE.

No man could be insensible to the kind words and to the kind reception which you have so generously accorded me, but I must say to you that your chairman has rather overrecommended the Secretary of Agriculture. If I should undertake to make a speech now I would lay myself open to the charge which Mark Twain made against Bob Burdette on a certain occasion. Bob, you know, was one of our Iowa humorists. In his later years he became a minister, and he started a little mission church out in California. Not long afterwards Mark Twain happened to be there over Sabbath and went around to hear Bob preach. Speaking of it afterwards he said that after Bob had been preaching some 15 or 20 minutes he made up his mind that when the collection was taken he would give $100 to help put that little church on its feet, but as Bob continued, he gradually lost his enthusiasm, and when they finally passed the basket, he stole a nickel out of it.

I do not propose to spoil this wonderful conference by making a speech or trying to recapitulate or summarize what you have done here. Since you give me the opportunity, however, there are two or three things I would like to say. You remember in opening the conference I said that I believed it to be the most representative gathering of the agricultural interests of the Nation that had ever been brought together. I made that statement on the strength of the invitations we had issued and the knowledge of the people to whom those invitations had been sent. This morning I asked our boys who have been working so faithfully in the headquarters office to give me a tabulation of the delegates who had registered and who have participated in the conference, and that recapitulation justified the statement I made at the opening.

I find that there have been a total of 336 delegates in attendance. I find that they represent some 20 different national farm organizations, and you may be interested in knowing the wide range of these organizations. There are delegates here from the Farm Bureau, from the Farmers' Union, from the Grange, from the equity societies, from the Gleaners' Federation, from independent farmers' clubs, from the Farmers' National Congress, the Farmers' International Farm Congress, from the National Board of Farm Organizations, the woolgrowers', tobacco growers', rice growers', fruit growers' associations, American Cotton Association, water users' associations, dairy and milk producers' associations, meat producers' associations, horse breeders' associations, vegetable growers' associations, warehousing association, nut growers, and grain growers. The representation from these associations numbers 87 delegates from 37 different States.

There are individual farmers in attendance to the number of 80. I mean by that men who come in their individual capacity and not as representatives of any organization. And these individual farmers come from 30 different States, thus making a total farm representation in attendance of 185 out of the 336. There are 79 delegates in attendance who are commissioners of agriculture or State officials