Excerpt from Address Delivered by Mr. James J. Hill Before the Farmers National Congress, Madison, Wisconsin, September 24, 1908 After an army has been raised and before it can enter upon any campaign, the first consider ation is to provide its food. If that is a failure, the bravest and best organized force will melt away in a week. Our national supply of food, in like manner, is fundamental to the organizationof our social life and to the progress of all our industries. Here we have so many people. Here will be, in a few years, so many more. These things are mathematically certain. What de mands will they make upon the country, and how well is it prepared to meet them? No question can be so fit for the consideration of a Farmers' Congress. Indeed, it is difficult to intelligently consider other questions until that one has been settled. And it is far from settled now. Untii lately it seems scarcely to have been thought of, and it is generally dismissed with the vague as sertion that things will come out all right as they always have' A Farmers' Congress should un derstand and prepare for the work that lies be fore the farmer, not in some indefinitely distant future but within this and the next succeeding generation. It is as well assured as any future event can be that the population of the United States will be by about the middle of the present century, or in less than fifty years. This is prov ed by the ratio of increase in the past. It may come a few years later or a few years earlier ao cording to circumstances, for good times lift both the immigration total and the domestic birth rate while depression decreases both. However, this is immaterial. Millions of persons now living will see the people here; and the first ques tion is how they are to be fed. There will be manygrave problems in such a human growth, but we may for the time being dismiss all the others un til we have considered the primary one of the bare maintenance of life. The food problem it self has numerous collateral issues, but for the sake of simplicity we may here consider only the matter of bread. Where and how are we to ob tain loaves enough to feed these coming millions? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.