portance as the tariff from the standpoint of our business needs. We can not afford to become fossilized or to fail to recognize the fact that as the needs of the country change it may be necessary to meet these new needs by changing certain features of our tariff laws. Still less can we afford to fail to recognize the further fact that these changes must not be made until the need for them outweighs the disadvantages which may result; and when it becomes necessary to make them they should be made with full recognition of the need of stability in our economic system and of keeping unchanged the principle of that system which has now become a settled policy in our national life. We have prospered marvelously at home. As a nation we stand in the very forefront in the giant international industrial competition of the day. We can not afford by any freak of folly to forfeit the position to which we have thus triumphantly attained.

CHAPTER IV.

MINNEAPOLIS TO SIOUX FALLS.

The train left Minneapolis at II p. m., and reached Sioux Falls, S. D., at 8 o'clock on the morning of April 5. The President was met by a delegation led by Mayor Burnside and escorted to the Cataract House by a detachment of two militia companies. He attended church in the morning, took a horseback ride in the afternoon, and went to church in the evening. He was up early Monday morning, and, after a ride around the city, went to the Auditorium, where he addressed four thousand school children. Subsequently he spoke from a stand to six thousand people, concerning The Wage-Worker and the Tiller of the Soil:

ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AT SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA, APRIL 6, 1903-THE WAGE-WORKER AND THE TILLER OF THE SOIL.

Fellow-Citizens:

There are many, many lesser problems which go to make up in their entirety the huge and complex problems of our modern industrial life. Each of these problems is, moreover, connected with many of the others. Few indeed are simple or stand only by themselves. The most important are those connected with the relation of the farmers, the stock growers and soil tillers, to the community at large, and those affecting the relations between employer and employed. In a country like ours it is fundamentally true that the well-being of the tiller of the soil and the wage-worker is the well-being of the state. If they are well 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 industry by the giant industrial changes of the last half century. There has been change with him, too, of course. He also can work to best advantage if he keeps in close touch with his fellows; and the success of the national 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 measures passed by the last Congress, or indeed by any Congress in recent years, is the Irrigation Act, which will do for the States 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 indirectly accomplish for the States in question.

The Department of Agriculture devotes its whole energy to working for the welfare of farmers and stock growers. In every section of our country it aids them in their constantly increasing search for a better agricultural education. It helps not only them, but all the Nation, in seeing that our exports of meats have clean bills of health, and that there is rigid inspection of all meats that enter into interstate commerce. Thirty-eight million carcasses were inspected during the last fiscal year. Our stock growers sell forty-five million dollars' worth of live stock annually, and these animals must be kept healthy or else our people will lose their trade. Our export of plant products to foreign countries amounts to over six hundred million dollars a and there is no branch of its work to which

year,