JAMES J. HILL 243 then looks out into the future. One of his employees once remarked, **He expects everything to be done yesterday/' Like the old Boman he serves his country because he is wise enough to recognize the mother of us all. This man sees in the soil the possibilities of a regenerate nation and the influ- ence which he has wielded in the development of the greatest agricultural region in the world cannot be overstated. At an age when most men have laid down the active duties of life, he is busily at work in the study of the great problems which confront a growing American population who are loidng the virility which comes from a hand to hand struggle with the soil; a generation who are deserting the farm and fleeing blindly to the supposed advantage of our great urban centers. He saySy ^^Men without land are a mob, and land without men is a wilderness. '* Recently this seer of the truth gave voice to the following warning : * * With something of that prophetic insight which seems to remain to men even in the lowest estate, the people of our huddled population centers have applied the most bitterly ironic expressions they could coin to those thor- oughfares where are congregated all the garish and offenidve symbols of the idleness, ostentation, decadent mentality, and moral corruption that eat forever at the vitals of this cen- tury's civilization. Not there, never there, but among cool woodlands, by still waters, through fields burdened with bounty, which nature yields unceasingly to those who have come under the pleasant rule of her laws and learned the les- sons that she has put for ages before unwilling minds — up to the gate of the farmstead where alone man can ever find the full message that this life holds for him, thither runs the great white way. When the famous Northern Securities case was before the Supreme Court of the United States and dissolution of his corporation was imminent, Mr. Hill expressed a profound truth when he said, * * I have made my mark on the surface of the earth and they cannot wipe it out with a court decision. ' ' In the early part of the nineteenth century some of the fore- most statesmen of their time stood on the floor of the United States Congress and delivered vigorous philippics against
