You in Iowa have many manufacturing centers, but you remain, and I hope you will always remain, a great agricultural State. I hope that the means of transporting your commodities to market will be steadily improved; but this will be of no use unless you keep producing the commodities, and in the long run this will largely depend upon your being able to keep on the farm a high type of citizenship. The effort must be to make farm life not only remunerative but attractive, so that the best young men and girls will feel inclined to stay on the farm and not to go to the city. Nothing is more important to this country than the perpetuation of our system of medium-sized farms worked by their owners. We do not want to see our farmers sink to the condition of the peasants of the Old World, barely able to live on their small holdings, nor do we want to see their places taken by wealthy men owning enormous estates which they work purely by tenants and hired servants. At present the ordinary farmer holds his own in the land as against any possible representative of the landlord class of farmer――that is, of the men who would own vast estates――because the ordinary farmer unites his capital, his labor, and his brains with the making of a permanent family home, and thus can afford to hold his land at a value at which it can not be held by the capitalist, who would have to run it by leasing it or by cultivating it at arm’s length with hired labor. In other words, the typical American farmer of to-day gets his remuneration in part in the shape of an independent home for his family, and this gives him an advantage over an absentee landlord. Now, from the standpoint of the nation as a whole it is preeminently desirable to keep as one of our chief American types the farmer, the farm home maker, of the medium-sized farm. This type of farm home is one of our strongest political and social bulwarks. Such a farm worked by the owner has proved by experience the best place in which to breed vigorous leaders alike for country and city. It is a matter of prime economic and civic importance to encourage this type of home-owning farmer.