The Farmer

VICE-PRESIDENT GILVERSON, in introducing the speaker said, Gentlemen, my first duty will be to extend the greetings of our President, who I am glad to tell you is progressing slowly to health, with a possibility of being with us in a week or two. We who live in cities and sometimes flatter ourselves that a spreading bulk of lofty sky-line is the final proof of independent wealth-producing power would do well to consider whether the city's expansion does not more nearly represent or express the growth in wealth of farm and field on which it feeds, and whose prosperity the city but reflects. But the steady stream of material wealth that flows into the city is not the only golden tide that leaves the land to enrich the metropolis. Left to itself, the city's physique and mentality would undoubtedly deteriorate and finally collapse. It is the inflow of blood and brawn and brain from the countryside, that mothers a race of resource, vigour and endurance, that is the city's salvation. (Hear, hear) All history attests this. The city is a consumer not only of food but of men. As debtor to the land, the city dweller has therefore a special obligation to cooperate with the farmer in the solution of the farmer's difficulties-for I presume he, like the rest of us, has difficulties. But this leads me to the point of saying that, before we can understand the problems of the farmer, we must understand the farmer in his thinking, his outlook upon life, and his relation to the world at large. For a sympathetic study of the farmer, to whom could we turn with a greater sense of pleasure or more delightful anticipation than to our distinguished guest, Sir Andrew Macphail whom we welcome here today. (Applause) By nature a scientist and a lover of the land, it was most natural that he should turn to the farm to find an added interest in life, lying outside the classic halls of the famous seat of learning of which he is a shining light. His attitude toward the farmer and toward the university is exemplified in the statement of his own, quoted of him frequently, that for six months in the year he lives upon his farm on Prince Edward Island, and for the balance of the time he merely exists at McGill. (Laughter)

Dr. Macphail is an old friend of the club. Ten years ago he gave us an analysis of that interesting personage, the suffragette. With that delightful versatility which is the charm of the scientific mind, he comes to us today to discuss the farmer. Of Sir Andrew Macphail's activities during the years that lie between the points that I have mentioned; I need say nothing. The history of his splendid service at the front and in London, in the work of medical organization and administration, is written in the annals of a grateful country-(applause)-and, has been recognized and honoured by the King. I have now very great pleasure in introducing him to you.

SIR ANDREW MACPHAIL.

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen,-Persons who are practised in the art of public speaking tell me that an audience will either go to sleep, or go away,' unless it is told in .the outset in plain terms what the discourse is to be; and those who remain to the end, must be given a message in simple terms which, as the saying is, can be carried away. I am quite ready to admit that, upon my infrequent appearances in public, this has not been the method I have followed. When I have any peculiar treasure to bring forthwhich happens about once in five years--I am in the habit of going to the University of Toronto; and I like to veil that treasure so that those who would find must seek. The university intellect, you know, is fond of cracking nuts, and I have no objection to giving it nuts to crack. (Laughter) The university intellect is fond of the abstract; but here, I take it, you are all business men, and not political men either, each one has his own ethic; the political man has for his ethic the love of his fellows; the business man has for his ethic the love of money. I shall depart then from my custom, and tell you in advance that the subject of my discourse today is the farmer; and I am sure that much that I say will be new. It will involve, of course, the telling of the truth, a thing which one must tell to the university in veiled terms. (Laughter) But in your own occupation you must have observed that a time comes when the truth must be told, at least to your banker (laughter); and, in telling it to your banker, you do learn the truth for yourselves. (Laughter)

It is quite the case, I am prepared to believe, that no man could carry on business if he had the truth of his business before his eyes continually. He must develop what is called optimism; but I would remind you that there is a point at which optimism quite definitely, al though insensibly, passes over into folly; and we in this country for the past forty years have indulged in this spirit of optimism to the heart's content.

We live in an age of advertisement; and those of you who are business men will bear me out, I think, in the assertion that there is a great gulf fixed between the advertisement and the truth of the thing which is alleged. (Laughter) We did not dare tell the truth to ourselves lest those persons whom we wished to attract into the country should overhear. (Laughter)

In civil life this question always does arise, in how far a person is justified in telling the truth. (Laughter) For this reason, that there are some subjects of which the truth cannot be told. In the Army, of course, the question does not arise. (Laughter) There is in every Army, I understand, an Intelligence Department which puts forth what is called propaganda; but the unfortunate thing is that the propaganda which we put forward for the misleading of the enemy is heard by ourselves, and is sometimes believed. So I say that this advertising which has been put forward for the use of the immigrant has been heard by ourselves, and we have come to believe it; but in my going about the country I think I detect a somewhat different spirit. That spirit has probably arisen from the fact that immigrants no longer come. Last year we turned away from our shores some twenty thousand of them; therefore today we can indulge amongst ourselves in a little plain speaking.

Most persons here present, who have attained to sufficient age, are aware that we in Canada have a winter climate. I am speaking of course, for the Province of Quebec-(laughter)-and not of these sub-tropical regions which lie on the shores of Lake Ontario. (Laughter) But it is thirty years since anybody has been permitted to say freely that we had in Canada a winter climate out of which some good might be extracted. In those days we made much of our climate; we had carnivals; we had houses built of ice, fire-works, snow-shoers, tobogannists; and we really did enjoy ourselves until a ban was put upon our pleasure by those advertisers whom I have mentioned. They said, "No, you must suffer this long winter, which you know is dreary, lest by advertising it persons from the outside will have their minds influenced against the country; and if those persons whom we expect, do not come into the country, how then shall we pay for the enormous outlays we have made, based upon the assumption that those immigrants were coming?" There is more truth in that statement than appears at first sight.

Thirty years ago we had a much more pleasant life than we have now, based upon climate and upon other considerations which I should like for a minute or two to call to your attention. We who live in this generation have lived in a peculiar time, under conditions that were only temporary whereas we thought them permanent. We entered into certain discoveries and made use of certain appliances. We began to employ them, and we found that on account of the newness of them, food-to put it plainly-never was so cheap before in the history of the world. That, of course, began with such discoveries as the steam engine and the power loom, and the various devices of electricity. We thought we found in them a contradiction of the old curse that was laid upon mankind, that he should live only by his labour and in the sweat of his face. I am not saying, of course, that the discovery of America was the great calamity of history, although the matter is arguable (laughter); neither do I say that the discovery of the West was a calamity to Canada, although there is much to be said for that also. (Laughter) This discovery created a reservoir into which the best elements of the world were drained, as you yourself pointed out, Sir; and those best elements being drained into this reservoir, the rest of the world was the poorer, and the reservoir itself was not much enriched. (Laughter) Our minds were led astray. We became ecstatic over what was called, with so much glibness, our natural resources, and we entirely forgot those natural laws which we are now beginning to see in operation as relentlessly as if they were the judgments of God.

I make no apology for devoting a moment or two to the operation of natural laws in opposition to natural resources of which we have heard so much-too muchand still hear., Even a minister of the Crown talks of the day when Canada will have a population as large as the population of the British Islands. You mentioned, Sir, that at one time I had elucidated the matter of the suffragettes, who have in these ten years come into their own; the statement was made by one of those women of the platform, only three days ago, that, if Canada was as thickly populated as Belgium, we should have within our borders 225 millions of people. Could folly go any further? And we also every one of us-are infected with this folly, the glorification of what we call our natural resources, when in reality the only resource in Canada is in its men and in its women. (Applause)

And yet the time has come, and now is, when those resources of which we have heard so much are at an end. That, of course, is one of those general statements which might in detail be contradicted. I do not propose to go over the history of these resources, but I shall ask your attention at least to one. A week or two ago the manufacturers of pulp wood and paper asked me to speak to them. I applied myself, to knowledge, and probably ended up by knowing more than they did about the forest resources of this country. In one of their official papers I found an estimate that the lumber in this country would endure for 434 years. That was some ten years ago; but I understand that they have dropped off 400 years, and are now disputing as to what part of the 34 is valid. (Laughter) And those diligent men, who are so assiduous in developing those resources, are exposed to malediction because they are cutting them down. That is the only method to employ. It is not a case of developing; it is a case of salvaging such as we have. There is a curious law that the wild and the tame cannot exist together; one or other must go. It applies to trees as well as to animals, and the forest is the most unsafe place in the world for a tree. For every twenty-two trees that are now standing, one is cut by the lumberman's ax, the others are destroyed by fire, or if there are two trees remaining, one of them is destroyed by disease. There is much talk of increasing our resources by what they call re-planting. Re-planting will do very well in an .old, settled, and cleared country. Those of us who have been in Europe know those forests, where labour can be had at sixty cents a day. Compare that with the labour here at four dollars and five dollars a day, and you will see at once that the problem is impossible. Not only is is impossible from that standpoint; it is almost impossible from natural laws, because trees will not grow under cover. We talk too glibly about replacing our forests. The pine forests, which some of you may remember, have all disappeared. They were the crowning glory of the earth, and required all geological time for their production. Pine forests having once appeared upon the earth, and having disappeared, will never be replaced, not in our time nor even in God's time, because He works by an entirely different method. There were the forests of old times. There were forests in Italy;

There were forests in China; but they have all disappeared, and have disappeared forever. I do not speak of coal except to point out that the coal in Canada is confined to both .the ends, that all of you in this part of the country are dependent entirely upon an outside source from which Canada draws more than three-quarters of its supplies, and that less coal is being raised in Canada today than seven years ago, the real reason being that labour is disorganized and that the coal is becoming increasingly hard to get.

One other resource, which is a fundamental resource of every country-and you will pardon me, Sir, if I become for a moment a little technical-is nitrogen. The accomplishment of the earth was the production of the pine forests and the production in the soil of nitrogen. All of those movements of history of which we hear so much, even those movements of history which began in the year 1914, were due to the extinction or elimination of nitrogen from the soil. Those great adventurers of the olden times, those hordes which came down upon Italy, which moved from one part of the world to the other, really meant that the country in which they lived had become exhausted. They were not moved by some mad impulse. They were moved by one of those inexorable laws which decress that a man must find sustenance for himself out of the fruits of the earth. Very well; we can start now from this point-that our resources are gone; I mean, gone in comparison with the days of abundance, when a man could go out into the woods or into the fields or to the streams and take his own sustenance and find his own shelter. Those days, gentlemen, are gone forever, and we are now face to face with the fact; and the man who faces the fact first, and always has faced the fact, is the farmer himself. (Hear, hear and applause)

I am sure that some of you may expect that I should advert to certain movements that are said to be going on in this Province, by which an unusual number of farmers have become engaged in politics. That is not my theme at all; it is something far deeper. But I would pause long enough to say that the farmer, when he engages in politics, is no longer a farmer; he is a politician, and is likely to lose the qualities which he acquired upon his own land-qualities which have their best manifestation upon his own farm. (Hear, hear) That is what I fear; and I fear further, that the farmer, because he works, may get it into his head that he has some affinity or some identity of interest with those who work in the city. He has none at all. The country and the town have always been at enmity; always will be at enmity.

You referred yourself, Sir, in the opening remarks, to the drain ,that was going on from the country into the city. We have all seen it; and we all know what happens to the farm which devotes itself to the raising of oats, and lawyers, and school-teachers, and doctors, and serving maids for export to the city. (Hear, hear) The real perception of that is the source of this enmity. As long ago as the time of Elizabeth a rigid law was made, which I always thought an excellent one, that all houses within ten miles of the metropolis should be pulled down; second, that all houses built in the metropolis itself that year should be destroyed. Her successor--that wise man, James the Sixth-enacted a further law, that any person who had a house in the town and a house in the country should be compelled to go and live in the country, and there give an example to his fellowmen of what was called good housekeeping. (Laughter and applause) I very well remember being in a small town in northern France in the Spring of 1918, in an estaminet, as it is called-that is, a place where you can get a drink. (Laughter) Three French soldiers came in and sat down at one of those little iron tables. I could not see that they were doing much harm. One of them took up the morning paper, and his neighbour said to him, "What is the news?" "The news is good; the shells are falling on Paris." I think that expresses the fundamental enmity that exists between the country and the town. The French are an old and civilized people, and they have watched this process for thousands of years, which we are only now beginning to perceive.

The next thing that strikes me is this: that having used up this treasure-trove which we found, we are now back to a perception of the old truth that the world is and always has been on the verge of starvation. There never was at any time in the history of the world enough food to carry over one failure of crop. It is quite true that by our recent methods of transportation we have persuaded ourselves that we can eliminate the element of famine. All that transportation does is to spread the famine a little more evenly. I said that the element in excess was very small, and that it was only by the most assiduous work that the population was fed--the most assiduous work on the part of .the farmer. But by our present methods, this surplus will soon diminish, and all those of us who live in cities will be face to face with starvation.

The reason is- this: there is what is called "spare time." Everything a farmer does is done in his spare time. (Laughter) He does his day's work of eight hours. That is quite enough time in which to support himself and his family. He then must work an additional eight hours for the sake of producing a surplus to feed those of us who live in cities. (Applause) Now, the question arises, and it is a serious one, how long is this to last ?

I saw an illustration of it only last summer. A neighbour of mine, who in the course of sixty years has become an extremely rich man. He has six thousand dollars in the bank after sixty years of labour; he has 200 acres of land, 40 head of cattle, and all kinds of machinery. His eight hours work was over at 4 o'clock; but in that place they had a new system of time, which we never got to understand completely, in which five o'clock was four o'clock, or four o'clock five, I am not quite sure which. (Laughter) Well, this man did not understand it either, but he had occasion to use some fertilizer for his farm for the production of the surplus of which I have been speaking. He went at four o'clock according to his time-which turned out to be five o'clock by the time of the man who kept the railway station-and when he got there, in the middle of the day as it appeared to him, he found the station house locked. He also found that this man-whom he knew to be in the Government employ, that is, his own employ-had finished his eight hours work, and had gone off with his fishing rod and basket. This farmer went home and reflected upon these things. He said nothing. Farmers say little, but they think profoundly. The sum of the matter was that he, being a rich man, advertised his farm for sale, sold his cattle and his machinery, and has now moved into the little village, where he rests and enjoys himself fishing with his rod and his basket. Probably he and the station agent go together. (Laughter)

When I said "spare time" I meant precisely what I said. Those of us whose memories go back forty or fifty years, will remember that the first generation of pioneers came into this country and built themselves some kind of shelter which lasted them perhaps twenty years, and that they then felt the necessity for a new house. This farmer had 4 vision of a new house. He went into his woods year after year, for ten or fifteen years before he brought out enough material for this new house. The result was that all over Canada there were new houses builded by men in their spare time, literally created out of nothing. Now, the woods are gone; the craftsman is gone, and when a farmer today is face to face with the problem of building a new house, that house will cost him as much as if it were built in the town. The farmer, then, must get from his surplus material enough to compete with you in these towns, who build houses for yourselves. That is how the labour question affects the farmer. He does not like it; he is suspicious of it; he thinks it is made up of dishonesty, or in sheer wickedness, and he will have nothing to do with it. Of course he underestimates the thrift of the workmen who live in cities. I had an illustration of it in Ottawa the other day. I was in the house of a man who required a plumber for a little job that he could do for himself for thirty-five cents, if he had proper tools, which he had not, and he sent for a plumber, and the bill in the end was $4.70, to cover the time when the plumber's boy was away for his tools. (Laughter) There was a story in the Army about a soldier who had been a plumber, and when he was ordered to advance he was seen going in the opposite direction. He explained to his officer that he was going back for his bayonet. (Laughter) Well, this plumber turned out to be not so frivolous as I thought he was, because he told me that he had in his home two phonographs, one of which had cost him $300, and another hack cost him only $70 and he used the $70 one for every day work; but he said, if I came to his house, he would play the $300 phonograph for me. (Laughter) Now, the farmer is not quite insensible to all these things. Of course he too has been led astray. If there is a farmer in this audience I am sure he has a piano in his house; he had at one time an organ, but with the rising tide of fashion, that was not enough. Now the farmer also has a piano in his house, which is to be paid for out of the surplus of which I am speaking.

When this use of spare time has been eliminated and the work is done in the factories-not in the spare time -the womenkind are reduced to a state of idleness or what is still worse, a state of futile endeavour to play this piano of which I was speaking a moment ago. In the olden days women also bore their part, and we in Canada had double the efficiency, because women themselves were occupied in doing work of utility. (Hear, hear) I have such an one in mind. If you gave to her a handful of flax and a sheep, and gave her time enough, she would produce a complete equipment of clothing for a man with which he could go to the legislature at the opening which takes place in a day or two. There would be a white shirt and a white collar, and there would be the finest of black cloth. All those things were done in the spare time. That day is gone, and we must produce them in these eight hours which are now the fashion.

I am not the first person who has made this discovery. Every one is now advising the farmer. Some say he must be given more machinery. The most expensive way in the world of doing a thing is doing it by machinery, for the reason that most people are engaged in making machines for making more machines. (Laughter)

In England, on one hundred acres of land there are forty-five agricultural persons; in America there are two and one-half. Mr. Vanderlip has been putting this forward as to the great advantage of America. It works exactly the other way. A hundred acres of land in England supports forty-five persons; a hundred acres of land in America supports just two and one-half persons.

If I were speaking to farmers specifically of their own trade I should much like to tell them of 'experiments which I have carried on to show that a crop of wheat can be gathered and made ready for food much more economically and efficiently-to use your own word-by the use of the scythe and the flail than it can by all of those contraptions which are made for the benefit of the farmer. That, of course, is a dark subject, one which you would not understand. (Great laughter)

Now the farmer hears that he must be educated. You never can educate a class. You cannot educate a class in your own public schools; and, if a farmer were to follow the course of education which is laid down for him, he would be on the roadside within twelve months. I have followed these experiments myself, and if it were not that I had some secret resources I would not be speaking to you today. (Laughter) Every kind of device has been tried to get rid of this old injunction that a man must labour in the sweat of his face, and everything that has been done for the farmer has worked to his detriment, because, it has never occurred to anybody that all that the farmer required was to be left alone, that he himself knows how to spend his money better than anybody else can spend it for him; and that, it seems to me, is the outcome of our whole endeavour-to persuade the farmer to spend his money as we think it ought to be spent.

You have what is called a rural delivery, by which his letters and his papers are brought to his door. That only completes the isolation of the farmer, because there was a time when he went to the country store and had some pleasant converse with his fellows. You have put a telephone in his house, and the result is that his womenkind, so I am told, spend most of their spare time in gathering up the foolish gossip of the neighbourhood. (Laughter) And now, if I can believe what I read in the morning papers, you propose to build some thousands of miles of road for him; but you are not building those roads for him-he knows that perfectly well-you are building those roads for yourselves, and you are building them at his expense. (Great laughter and applause)

I say, then, that all you can do for the farmer is to leave him alone; and if those farmers who now have possession of political authority would take a word of advice from me, it is just that-to leave the farmer alone and not be led aside by the clamour which is raised in the city that certain things be done which are primarily for the good of the city and not for the good of the farm. The time is coming, and now is, when we must abandon all those tricks and this legerdemain of finance; when we must face the thing as a man faces it in his own business. We in Canada have got ourselves into a hole by our own optimism, and there is no way of getting out of the hole except by digging our way out. If by any chance a family should come here from outside of this province or outside of Canada; if a family, for example, should come from Quebec to one of the cities, a family consisting of a man and woman and four children, which coming from Quebec I take as the minimum, and if he were to settle himself in an Ontario town, he would find, first, that he had an obligation upon him of $3,200. That is his capital charge. If you take all the municipal and provincial and Canadian debt, you would find that it works out at $3,200 for each man with a family. And if this person should be fortunate enough to enjoy a salary of $5,000, which I am told is not very large in Toronto (laughter), out of that he will pay in taxes $792. Now, upon whom is this charge eventually to fall? You have heard much of a man called George -I mean Henry George; he had some device, a new device, as he thought, by which all the taxes should be placed upon the land. That, of course, is where the taxes always lay, and do so now lie-not upon these workers in the town with their eight hours, because when hard times come they can flit to some other country where they think they will be happier, but the man who is in possession of the land is the man who will ultimately bear-this burden. And yet we have not faced it. There is only one remedy and that is, that we should begin to pay our obligations, whether those are obligations of duty or obligations of folly; we cannot separate the two. We have obligations of folly upon us-obligations which were inherent in our political constitution, by which the various provinces had to be conciliated because they thought certain other provinces were getting advantages. You may remember that, ten or twenty years ago, nothing would satisfy the West unless they had a new railway built to the Hudson Bay. They have had their railway, but I have not heard they are any happier. The burden is upon the whole country to pay for this and to pay for all such other adventures. It will be disclosed in the higher price of foods.

We are apt to lead ourselves astray by thinking that the new state of affairs is due to the war. The war was merely the closing of an old era, and the beginning of a new. The forces which brought it about began to show at least nineteen years ago. They gradually increased until they became overwhelming. Even if the war had never taken place, we would still be face to face with those problems.

A long time ago I devised for myself this principle, when I had to say anything in public to get the first sentence right and the last sentence right, and I never found any difficulty in filling in the middle. (Laughter) I always found it wise to leave the last sentence until I was about to come into the room, and I got that sentence this morning from my old friend Prof. Mavor. His sentence was this: that we who live in cities are without our God. That is a dark saying which Prof. Mavor himself would have to elaborate; but it is eternally true that the tribal god and the god of the household exist in the country; that the cities are too conglomerate, and instead of having one God they have a variety of false gods. The city was always the home of the false gods. This being the case, one who sees the fact clearly is the real optimist, because he is dissatisfied with the age of materialism through which we have passed. I suppose there never was in the history of the world a period so utterly materialistic as the last fifty or sixty years; and we now find, in our public distress and our private-sorrow, what has come to us by following those false and material gods.

The only remedy is the old remedy, and that is the remedy of starvation; and I am much more optimistic than most of my friends, because they think that this starvation will be postponed for a good many years, while I think that it will come very quickly. That is the measure of my optimism. (Laughter) But the world has never lived without a witness; and what we lose on one hand, we will gain on the other. We have been too comfortable in our lives; we have had too many. things; and we forget how near to the earth we all actually live, with those new devices, with this new device of electricity of which I suppose I ought to speak with some respect in this part of Canada. And yet, keep this in mind: the first object of man in life is to keep himself upright on his feet; .the second is to keep himself warm; those are the real problems. Now, the equivalent of a ton of coal a month for heating purposes, expressed in terms of electricity, is twenty-four horses working for twenty-four hours a day for thirty days. You see, then, how little electricity has, what little bearing it has upon life, and that this is also one of those inventions and devices of which I was speaking. You are concerned in the towns about those material things, about houses for yourselves which are to be built at the expense of the country. I do not hear of any houses being built in the country at your expense (laughter); and men are taught that they are entitled to a degree of comfort far beyond anything that can be supplied out of this surplus labour. It is altogether likely that while we are seeking comfort for ourselves, whilst we are dealing with those houses with their bathrooms and their ventilation and their sanitary arrangements, we have entirely lost sight of what used to be called the heavenly mansion in which the human spirit has always found refuge from the difficulties of this world. We have forgotten those heavenly mansions because we were too comfortable in the houses which we have built with our hands.

Early in 1919, when the troops were coming down from Germany through the, devastated area, I was in an ambulance train. In the night we stopped, and I was awakened by what seemed to be the sound of sobbing. One looked out and saw two or three points of light travelling over the area, and at first thought that it was some women looking for their dead. Instead of that one discovered that the sobbing came from the engine which had been drawing the train, and it occurred to me that this was an excellent illustration for the time and the circumstance,-that this material thing, this material engine, was sobbing out her heart because she knew that the end of her material world had come. (Loud applause)

THE CHAIRMAN: We are happy in having with us today at the table, the Secretary of the U.F.O., Mr. J. J. Morrison. (Applause) He is a student of agriculture, having himself at one time been a tiller of the soil. I shall ask him to extend to the speaker the thanks of this club for the profound, original, and delightful address which we have, just heard.

MR. J. J. MORRISON.

Gentlemen,-It is with sincere pleasure that I desire to move a vote of thanks and appreciation to Sir Andrew Macphail for this most searching address. I do not know that I can say on behalf of all the people here that you thoroughly appreciate and believe all he said; but as a farmer myself, and on behalf of some others here who, I believe, are farmers, I have no hesitation in saying we endorse every word he said. (Applause) I can also say that, if seventy-five per cent. of the great silent throng in the back concessions were here, they, too, wonld say, "We appreciate every word you have said." (Hear, hear) It was a moat searching address. I am sorry that you cannot all believe it; I know you cannot, simply because many of us don't know. But those who can believe it, will, I know, appreciate it, and will endorse the vote of appreciation which will soon be given. I only want to draw your attention to two things which it is absolutely essential that you should understand, otherwise this great address will have missed its aim and object. Sir Andrew told us that this Parliament of men who were elected as farmers, would cease to be farmers and become politicians. I believe, probably, that will be true. It would be deplorable if there was not a safetyvalve where their deterioration could be prevented, and the prevention of it lies with the men on the back concessions to remain true to the principles for which they elected those men; it lies with them to repudiate them when they go wrong; and if the U.F.O. does not do that very thing, it will have failed in the principles for which it was created. Had Sir Andrew Macphail been a member of the U.F.O. he could not have more fully spoken that which we would like to hear him speak. He told you business men of the depopulation of this country. How many of you realize that 16,000 people leave the farms of Ontario every year? A good sized city leaves the farm lands of this country that were made by the pioneers of whom he spoke. How are you going to maintain your businesses in the cities and see them go on under such circumstances? What is your remedy? The United Farmers have given their remedy; so has Sir Andrew Macphail. Do you believe it? I hope you will consider it, and if you do not consider it, then his great address is lost. If you are business men, you must formulate in your own minds a remedy, and if you have that remedy, we would like to hear it in the near future. If the farmers are wrong and you are right, then give us your theory; if you have not any theory, then the farmers must be right. I know by your appearance that you have all been intensely interested in this address, and I am cure you will all loin in this vote. (Applause)