ly
requires large capital. Then come farther east and take these lands
that are swamp, that need draining, and build ditches and dikes and
put these lands into the service of America. This is what I call the
making of the nation.

That land should tie up with all other land. Means of communication
should be a part of that general scheme. We should have as good roads
between the little farms in Mississippi or in South Carolina or in
Northern Minnesota as we have in Maryland or in California. There is a
work--the work that I have in mind, and for which Congress has made a
small and tentative appropriation--the work of surveying this country
and seeing how many of this Nation's land resources have not been
mobilized and how best they can be used for providing homes for these
men who come back, as well as adding to the wealth of the world. There
is a work that ties up directly with your work, because I want to have
small communities in which men have small acreages of land, not to
speculate with but to cultivate; and these acreages are to center in
small communities where men can talk together and profit by their own
mistakes and their own successes and where those small communities
will be tied up with all neighboring communities, so that there will
be easy access between all parts of the country. Good roads and a
rural express must be had. If you can help the Government in building
good roads for little money or show how a rural express can be most
profitably developed, you will be helping in the making of a new
America.

And I can conceive of a United States that will be as rich per acre as
France; in which the people will be divided into small communities,
industrial communities as well as agricultural; for every one of
these little places ought to have its own creamery, its own cannery.
The farmer is the poorest man in the world to develop any kind of
cooperative scheme. He needs assistance and is always hampered by the
lack of capital. But now is our chance to see what can be done; to
show it in the building of ideal communities, communities that have
good houses, that have good sanitation, that are on good land where
there is somebody who can direct them as to what should be planted and
what should be avoided, communities which may be connected up with the
world by highways, by developing rivers, and by railroads.

Now, I think if there is one great fault that industrially we have
been guilty of in the United Sta