whether the farmers and their wives in his neighborhood are satisfactorily organized, he answers:  “Oh, there is a little one-horse grange gang in our locality, and every darned one thinks they ought to be a king.”  To the question, “Are the renters of farms in your neighborhood making a satisfactory living?” he answers:  “No; because they move about so much hunting a better job.”  To the question, “Is the supply of farm labor in your neighborhood satisfactory?” the answer is:  “No; because the people have gone out of the baby business”; and when asked as to the remedy, he answers, “Give a pension to every mother who gives birth to seven living boys on American soil.”  To the question, “Are the conditions surrounding hired labor on the farm in your neighborhood satisfactory to the hired men?” he answers:  “Yes, unless he is a drunken cuss,” adding that he would like to blow up the stillhouses and root out whiskey and beer.  To the question, “Are the sanitary conditions on the farms in your neighborhood satisfactory?” he answers:  “No; too careless about chicken yards, and the like, and poorly covered wells.  In one well on neighbor’s farm I counted seven snakes in the wall of the well, and they used the water daily:  his wife dead now and he is looking for another.”  He ends by stating that the most important single thing to be done for the betterment of country life is “good roads”; but in his answers he shows very clearly that most important of all is the individual equation of the man or woman.

Like the rest of the Commissions described in this chapter, the Country Life Commission cost the Government not one cent, but laid before the President and the country a mass of information so accurate and so vitally important as to disturb the serenity of the advocates of things as they are; and therefore it incurred the bitter opposition of the reactionaries.  The report of the Country Life Commission was transmitted to Congress by me on February 9, 1909.  In the accompanying message I asked for $25,000 to print and circulate the report and to prepare for publication the immense amount of valuable material collected by the Commission but still unpublished.  The reply made by Congress was not only a refusal to appropriate the money, but a positive prohibition against continuing the work.  The Tawney amendment to the Sundry Civil bill forbade the President to appoint any further Commissions unless specifically authorized by Congress to do so.  Had this prohibition been enacted earlier and complied with, it would have prevented the appointment of the six Roosevelt commissions.  But I would not have complied with it.  Mr. Tawney, one of the most efficient representatives of the cause of special privilege as against public interest to be found in the House, was later, in conjunction with Senator Hale and others, able to induce my successor to accept their view.  As what was almost my last official act, I replied to Congress that if I did not believe the Tawney amendment to be unconstitutional I would veto the Sundry Civil bill which contained it, and that if I were remaining in office I would refuse to obey it.  The memorandum ran in part: