The Birmingham age-herald., 1916-03-02

nome. She ndS message or Cneer ] to the farmers of Alabama whom tho robbed of the yigor that formerly cha | Mrs Mathis began her work in Chl- 1 ton with an address at the County High | school in Clanton Monday morning. and | throughout the day she was speaking l formally or informally, whether her
 hearers were many or few. In the aft | ernoon she was accompanied on trips to
 Thorsby and Jemison by prominent citi-
 zens of Clanton. including MT Callen, | a well known banker; Mrs. Callen, Mrs.
 Mullins, Mrs. Grover and Hr. Gulledge, | who came from Verbena for the ex- l press purpose of introducing her. The
 party motored from town to town over 1 splendid roads, returning to Clanton late
 in the afternoon. after visiting Thorsby | institute the Jemison Public school and | passing through the farm lands which af- l ford such ample opportunity for the 1 farmers of the county.
 | Chiffon probably will be filled with | dipping vats year from now, for her | people are incensed over the ''tcky' | cattle that menace the health of the children, and they have asked Mrs.
 Mathis to come back-they always ask | Ter lO COluG DdCk-dnQ H6lp LneIu WlLn l their campaign. They have caught new vision of the possibilities of tilling the l soil and they have already adopted the | doctrines of better farming.
 1 Mrs. Mathis doesn't preach anything l she doesn't know. Perhaps that is the ! reason for the enthusiasm with which 1 she is received. Perhaps that is why 1 she grips her audiences from the very ] first and plays upon their hearts and | minds at will. It seems that they 1 realize that she is stretching out a l helping hand to lift them up and they, as farmers, meet her on common ground as | a farmer-one who has made good. ] Diversified farming is the crux of Mrs.
 Mathis talks. Farming is a good busi-
 ness" she said, "but the ground is sick
 of one crop. It is sick of cotton, and by 1 running the land down you are having i to mortgage your property to death, and are making the crop self-consuming. 1 Build it up. There are certain robber crops and certain builder crops that | everyone ought to know, and I have | some cards printed and have one on the walls of each of the houses for my ten- ants. If they can't read. it doesn't mat l ter their children may; and if their l children can't read them, maybe some l one will come along and read it to them. The robber crops are cotton, corn, wheat and oats. The builder crops are peas, beans, clovers and vetches, and you I can't build the land in winter when it is ] not in use.
 1 Why, we don't realize what our land
 can build the land in winter when it is some farmers in this state who never | grew a stalk of corn? And yet a little boy 15 years old raised 2321a bushels to | the acre. and made the worlds record. 1 Walter Lee Dunson put Alabama on the I map, and when the announcement was
 made up in Washington some fellow way back in the audience called out: Ala l bama! Alabama! Is that the name of a county, town or disease? It is a dis
 ease, and I hope you all catch it."
 l Mrs. Mathis told her audience that they
 would be surprised to see the shiftless- l ress of large per cent of Alabama | farmers. Sixty-one per cent of them are
 renters, she says, and 45 per cent own not thing in the world. They go from one place to another without responsi- 1 bility and, according to Mrs Mathis, they
 might change the state motto to Ala bama, Here We Move.''
 ! Ten or fifteen thousand of the peo- pie are moving every year." she con tinued in her Clanton address, and the majority of them are living on one meal a day The appalling poverty of our | people is what is keeping them down. The average Alabama farmer, counting | his wife and three children, makes less | than 20 cents a day, and how in the world can a man live and educate his | family on that? You talk about Hitter | acy, and what are you going to do about | that? We have to educate the farmers. They raise nothing but cotton and the l boil weevil gets that. It's the small
 man we are after and we must teach | him what he can do. In my trips | through the state I have come across 800 hogs tied to a chain to tree with not a
 blade of grass in sight. What sort of
 meat can they get out of that? And none of them have a garden.
 | T asked one bunch of people why
 they didn't raise something beside cot
 ton and one old fellow who seemed to | think he ought to give some excuse
 rose up in the audience and drawled out | Well, I like garden; I've always liked a garden, but my wife's just too blamed 1 lazy to have one.
 EACH COUNTY FOR ITSELF
 What we want to do is to get each county working for itself. Chiffon county | for Chiffon county'-let that be your | slogan, and get the business men and merchants interested learn to feed your-
 selves; go after your own county.
 l Get rid of the tick. Do you know that | the tick costs Alabama 100000 a year? Every car of cattle that goes to the
 north from quarantined territory has to l be marked diseased cattle from tho
 south,' and the price of ticky yearlins
 goes down to $6 instead of being sS5 as l it should
 "Six hundred babies die every year of summer complaint that is caused from drinking milk from ticky cattle" was one
 of Mrs. Mathis greatest arguments fol tick eradication, and two mothers looked ] hungrily at their little ones toddling | about the rostrum as she made it. Others
 had tears in their eyes. and if an cleo tion is called they will surely see that l it carries. After the meeting at Thors- 1 by one prominent club woman said that l she would see that it was called
 1 But you must come back and helr us.'' they cry a.ways-and always Mrs. | Mathis says. 'I will come back" She | has just completed a tour of 23 counties