Now, men of Iowa, I want to say just a word on a matter that concerns not the States of the Mississippi Valley itself, but the States west of them, the States of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. Unfortunately, I am not able on this present trip to visit those States, or I should speak to their own people on the point to which I now intend to allude; but after all anything that affects a considerable number of Americans who live under one set of conditions, must be of moment to all other Americans, for never forget, friends, that in the long run we shall all go up or go down together. The States of the high plains and of the mountains have a peculiar claim upon me, because for a number of years I lived and worked in them, and I have that intimate knowledge of their people that comes under such conditions. In those States there is need of a modification of the land laws that have worked so well in the well-watered fertile regions to the eastward, such as those in which you here dwell. The one object in all our land laws should always be to favor the actual settler, the actual home maker, who comes to dwell on the land and there to bring up his children to inherit it after him. The Government should part with its title to the land only to the actual home-maker――not to the profit-maker, who does not care to make a home. The land should be sold outright only in quantities sufficient for decent homes――not in huge areas to be held for speculative purposes or used as ranches, where those who do the actual work are merely tenants or hired hands. No temporary prosperity of any class of men could in the slightest degree atone for failure on our part to shape the laws so that they may work for the permanent good of the home-maker. This is fundamental, gentlemen, and is simply carrying out the idea upon which I dwell in speaking to you of your own farms here in Iowa. Now in many States where the rainfall is light it is a simple absurdity to expect any man to live, still less to bring up a family, on one hundred and sixty acres. Where we are able to introduce irrigation, the homestead can be very much less in size――can, for instance, be forty acres; and there is nothing that Congress has done during the past six years more important than the enactment of the national irrigation law. But where irrigation is not applicable and the land can only be used for grazing, it may be that you can not run more than one steer to ten acres, and it is not necessary to be much of a mathematician in order to see that where such is the case a homestead of one hundred and sixty acres will not go far toward the support of a family. In consequence of this fact, homesteaders do not take up the lands in the tracts in question. They are left open for anybody to graze upon that wishes to. The result is that the men who use them moderately and not with a view to exhausting their resources are at the mercy of those who care nothing for the