Vilas County news. [volume] (Eagle River, Vilas County, Wis.) 1896-1927, 1903-04-13
LESSER PROBLEMS
ARE ALSO IMPORTANT, SAYS
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT.
IN SIOUX FALLS SPEECH
Nations Executive Speaks Before
Large Crowd in South Dakota City
on the Wage Worker and the TiIIer
of the SoiI-Good Work Done by
Strike Commission.

Sioux Falls, S. D., April 7.-"There
are many, many lesser problems,
said President Roosevelt concerning
the subject The Wage Worker and the
Tiller of the Soil, (which go TO make
up in their entirety the huge complex
problems of our modern industrial
| life. Each of these problems is,
moreover, connected with many of the
others. Few indeed are simple on
stand only by themselves. The most
| important are those connected with
the relation of the farmers, the stock
growers and soil tillers, TO the COM
munity at large, and those affecting
the relations between employer anG
employed. In a country like ours il
is fundamentally true that the we'll
being of the tiller of the soil and the
wage-worker is the well-being of the
state. If they are we'll off, then we
need concern ourselves but little as
to how other classes stand. for they
will inevitably be well off too: and. on
the other hand, there can be no real
general prosperity unless based on the
foundation of the prosperity of the
wage-worker and the tiller of the soil.
But the needs of these two classes
are often not the same. The tiller of
| the soil has been of all our citizens
the one on the whole the least affected
in his ways of life and methods of in
dustry by the giant industrial changes
of the last half century There has
been change with him, too, of course
He also can work 20 best advantage
| If he keeps in close touch with his
| fellows; and the success of the ma
tional department of agriculture has
shown how much can be done for him
by rational action of the government
Nor is it only through the department
that the government can act. One of
the greatest and most beneficent meas
ures passed by the last congress, or
indeed by any congress in recent
years, is the irrigation act, which win
do for the state of the great plains
and the Rocky mountain region at
least as much as ever has been done
for the states of the humid region by
river and harbor improvements. Few
measures that have been put upon the
statute books of the nation have done
more FOR the people than this law will,
I firmly believe, directly and Indirect
ly accomplish for the state in ques-
ton.
There are a number of very i'm
poTtant questions, such as that OF
good roads, with which the states
alone can deal, and where all that the
rational government can do is to CO
operate with them. The same is true
of the education of the American
farmer. A number of the states have
themselves started to help in this
work and the department of agricul-
ture does an immense amount which
is in the proper sense of the word ed
ucational, and educational in the most
practical way.
1T is therefore clearly true that a
great advance has been made in the
direction Of finding ways by which the
government can help the farmer to
help himself-the only kind of help
which a self-respecting man will ac-
cept, or, may add, which will in the
end do him any good. Much has been
done in these ways, and farm life and
farm processes continually change for
the better. The man who tills his
own farm, whether on the prairie or
in the woodland, the man who grows
what we eat and the raw material
which is worked up into what We
wear. still exists more nearly under
the conditions which obtained when
the "embattled farmers" of rs made
this country a nation than is true OF
any others of our people.
E...-.-----L 49, -.