in the fact that we would live on farms. When De Toquevile came over here in 1830 he said the reason democracy was a success in this country was because we were all practically living on farms, living on what we raised ourselves, and standing equally.

To-day the tendency is away from the farm toward the city, toward industrial life, toward aggregations of people, away from the small town to the larger town, and from the larger town to the metropolis. People are being drawn from the farms, so that one-half of the arable land this side of the Mississippi is unused to-day; so that between here and New Orleans there are 40,000,000 acres of land privately owned and unused; so that in the great Northwest, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, etc., there are 100,000,000 acres of cut-over lands that are practically unused; and we have a new nation practically in the undrained lands of our rivers and our bays and inlets, lands that are as rich as any that lie out of doors, as rich as the valley of the Nile or of the Euphrates. In the far western country, there are at least 15,000,000 acres of land that we can put under water. Under water, that land produces more than one crop a year, and that an exceptionally rich crop.

We have been extending ourselves because of war in a great many different directions. The Government has taken to itself unprecedented and unthought-of powers because of the necessities of our condition. I say that to meet the problem of the returned soldier we ought to take advantage of this opportunity to do the work now that must eventually be done and reclaim these arid lands of the West. Turn the waters of the Colorado over the desert of Arizona, store those waters in the Grand River and in the Green River, and let them flow down at the right times on that desert so as to raise cotton and cantaloupes and alfalfa. Then come east and take the stumps from these cut-over lands. Do it not as a private enterprise, because that is a slow, slow process. Men are discouraged and disheartened when they look at the problem of pulling an Oregon fir stump out of the ground. It really requires large capital. Then come farther east and take these lands that are swamp, that need draining, and build ditches and dikes and put these lands into the service of America. This is what I call the making of the nation.

That land should tie up with all other land. Means of communication should be a part of that general scheme. We should have as good roads between the little farms in Mississippi or in South Carolina or in Northern Minnesota as we have in Maryland or in California. There is a work—the work that I have in mind, and for which Congress has made a small and tentative appropriation—the work of surveying this country and seeing how many of this Nation's land resources have not been mobilized and how best they can be used for providing homes for these men who come back, as well as adding to the wealth of the world. There is a work that ties up directly with your work, because I want to have small communities in which men have small acreages of land, not to speculate with but to cultivate; and these acreages are to center in small communities where men can talk together and profit by their own mistakes and their own successes and where those small communities will be tied up with all neighboring communities, so that there will be easy access between all parts of the country. Good roads and a rural express must be had. If you can help the Government in building good roads for little money or show how a rural express can be most profitably developed, you will be helping in the making of a new America.

And I can conceive of a United States that will be as rich per acre as France; in which the people will be divided into small communities, industrial communities as well as agricultural; for every one of these little places ought to have its own creamery, its own cannery. The farmer is the poorest