But the world has moved in the past twenty-five years, and America not only has moved it, but has kept in the lead. ...

WHAT WE WANT

A greater America—­that is our objective.

We want our unused lands put to use.

We want the farm made more attractive through better rural schools, better roads everywhere, more frequent connection between town and farm, better means of distribution of products.

We want more men with garden homes instead of tenement houses.

We want our waters, that flow idly to the sea, put to use; more stored water for irrigation, more hydroelectric plants to supply industries, railroads and home and farming activities.  There should be electric lights upon the farm, and power for the sewing machine and the churn.  It can be done because it is being done on the best farms of the far West.

We want our streams controlled so that they do not wash away our cities, farms, and railroads, and so as to redeem the submerged bottom lands for the next generation. ...

We want fewer boys and girls, men and women, who can not read or write the language of our laws, newspapers, and literature, ... that those who live with us may really be of us. ...

We should dignify the profession of teaching as the foundation profession of modern democratic life. ...

We want definite and continuing studies made of our great industrial fiscal and social problems.  The framing of our policies should not be left to emotional caprice, or the opportunism of any group of men, but should be the result of sympathetic and deep study by the wisest men we have, irrespective of their politics.  There should be industrial conferences, such as those recently inaugurated, to arrive at the ways by which those who furnish the financial arm of industry and those who furnish the working arm of industry may most profitably and productively be brought into cooperation. ...  Through the study of what has been done we can give direction to our national thought and work with a will toward a condition in which labor will have recognition and be more certainly insured against the perils of non-occupation and old age, and capital become entitled to a sure return, because more constantly and productively used.

Then, too, we need a study made of the health conditions of our children,—­of the reason for the large percentage of undeveloped and subnormal children who are brought to our schools, and the larger number who do not reach maturity. ...  Underfed boys and ignorant boys are the ones who turn to Bolshevism.  We can not stand pat and let things drift without their drifting not to the “good old days” but to bad new days.