that if enough liars talked to you, you would get the truth; because the parts that they did not invent would match one another, and the parts that they did invent would not match one another.  Talk long enough, therefore, and see the connections clearly enough, and you can patch together the case as a whole.  I had somewhat that experience about Mexico, and that was about the only way in which I learned anything that was true about it.  For there had been vivid imaginations and many special interests which depicted things as they wished me to believe them to be.

Seriously, the task of this body is to match all the facts of business throughout the country and to see the vast and consistent pattern of it.  That is the reason I think you are to be congratulated upon the fact that you cannot do this thing without common counsel.  There isn’t any man who knows enough to comprehend the United States.  It is cooeperative effort, necessarily.  You cannot perform the functions of this Chamber of Commerce without drawing in not only a vast number of men, but men, and a number of men, from every region and section of the country.  The minute this association falls into the hands, if it ever should, of men from a single section or men with a single set of interests most at heart, it will go to seed and die.  Its strength must come from the uttermost parts of the land and must be compounded of brains and comprehensions of every sort.  It is a very noble and handsome picture for the imagination, and I have asked myself before I came here to-day, what relation you could bear to the Government of the United States and what relation the Government could bear to you?

There are two aspects and activities of the Government with which you will naturally come into most direct contact.  The first is the Government’s power of inquiry, systematic and disinterested inquiry, and its power of scientific assistance.  You get an illustration of the latter, for example, in the Department of Agriculture.  Has it occurred to you, I wonder, that we are just upon the eve of a time when our Department of Agriculture will be of infinite importance to the whole world?  There is a shortage of food in the world now.  That shortage will be much more serious a few months from now than it is now.  It is necessary that we should plant a great deal more; it is necessary that our lands should yield more per acre than they do now; it is necessary that there should not be a plow or a spade idle in this country if the world is to be fed.  And the methods of our farmers must feed upon the scientific information to be derived from the State departments of agriculture, and from that taproot of all, the United States Department of Agriculture.  The object and use of that department is to inform men of the latest developments and disclosures of science with regard to all the processes by which soils can be put to their proper use and their fertility made the greatest possible.  Similarly with the Bureau of Standards.  It is ready to supply those things by which you can set norms, you can set bases, for all the scientific processes of business.