The country church should be made a true social center, alive to every need of the community, standing for a broad individual outlook and development, taking the lead in work and in recreation, caring more for conduct than for dogma, more…

The country school should be made a vital center for economic, social, and educational co-operation; it is naturally fitted to be such a center for those engaged in commercial farming, and still more for those engaged in domestic farming…

The problem of the farm is really the problem of the family that lives on the farm.

It is our duty and our business to consider the farm laborer exactly as we consider the farmer.

It is exceedingly difficult to make a good citizen out of a man who cannot count upon some steadiness and continuity in the work which means to him his livelihood.

Above all, the conditions of farm life must always be shaped with a view to the welfare of the farmer’s wife and the farm laborer’s wife, quite as much as to the welfare of the farmer and the farm laborer.

To have the woman a mere drudge is at least as bad as to have the man a mere drudge.

It is every whit as important to introduce new machines to economize her labor within the house, as it is to introduce machinery to increase the effectiveness of his labor outside the house.

The woman who shirks her duty as housewife, as mother, is a contemptible creature; just as the corresponding man is a contemptible creature.

But the welfare of the woman is even more important than the welfare of the man; for the mother is the real Atlas, who bears aloft in her strong and tender arms the destiny of the world.

She deserves honor and consideration such as no man should receive.

But the average American woman does not shirk them; and it is a matter of the highest obligation for us to see that they are performed under conditions which make for her welfare and happiness and for the welfare and happiness of the…

Then came the time of stress and strain which culminated in the Civil War, the period of terrible struggle upon the issue of which depended the justification of all that we had done earlier, and which marked the second great period of…

The name of John Brown will be forever associated with this second period of the Nation’s history; and Kansas was the theater upon which the first act of the second of our great National life dramas was played.

It was the result of the struggle in Kansas which determined that our country should be in deed as well as in name devoted to both union and freedom, that the great experiment of democratic government on a national scale should succeed and…

Very much was done of good, and much, also, of evil; and, as was inevitable in such a period of revolution, often the same man did both good and evil.

For our great good fortune as a nation, we, the people of the United States as a whole, can now afford to forget the evil, or at least to remember it without bitterness, and to fix our eyes with pride on the good that was accomplished.

Even in ordinary times there are very few of us who do not see the problems of life as through a glass, darkly; and when the glass is clouded by the murk of furious popular passion, the vision of the best and the bravest is dimmed.

It is of little use for us to pay lip loyalty to the mighty men of the past unless we sincerely endeavor to apply to the problems of the present precisely the qualities which in other crises enabled the men of that day to meet those crises.

John Brown stands to us now as representing the men and the generation who rendered the greatest service ever rendered this country.

He stood for heroic valor, grim energy, fierce fidelity to high ideals.

A great debt is owed to John Brown because he is one of the most striking figures in the mighty struggle which was to keep us forever a free and united nation, which was to secure the continuance of the most tremendous democratic…

He did much in his life and more in his death; he embodied the inspiration of the men of his generation; his fate furnished the theme of the song which most stirred the hearts of the soldiers.

John Brown’s work was brought to completion, was made perfect, by the men who bore aloft the banner of the Union during the four terrible years which intervened between Sumter and Appomattox.

They alone, of all our people since we became a nation, rendered to us and to all who come after us a service literally indispensable.