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You know we use the word "farmer." Some of us think, as they did in so many parts of this country, north, south, east west, up to a very few years ago, that farmers were people who lived on those horrible things called country roads; in those small communities where it was almost impossible to get in or out; beyond buggy distance; and it was true. We thought in those days not so far past, of the man that we couldn't reach, by driving, and return within a day, as a man who was a farmer. He talked a different language. He might have had some common pride of the state with us, but he didn't have the same friends. He went to a different store. He had his own little circle, just as we had ours. It is only in the last fifty years that that definition of the farmer has been going out. We extended it, and we came to know people in neighboring communities. With the advent of the railroad, we began to travel farther from home.

After a while there came the automobile, of all shapes, sizes and prices, and they came into the hands of the average citizen, and the average citizen began, first, to know his own state, and then to slip over the border into another state.

Now we are beginning to think of people all over this country as neighbors, and, after a while, perhaps -- we are still quite far from it; but not as far as some of us imagine -- the people of other lands, are going to seem less foreign to us. Some day most of this world is going to be kin, as the people in this nation have become kin after so long a time.

In that spirit of learning to know our neighbor, we are bringing out the cripple. We are extending our rural nursing. What has happened to the medical profession itself? Somebody in Boston discovers something, and every doctor in this whole, broad land knows it within a month. Or somebody discovers a new cure, like the man who discovered insulin, how long ago? three or four years, or something like that. Today insulin exists in almost every community throughout the United States. It is because we are kin.

This thought of state responsibility I am perfectly convinced is sound, not only economically, but constitutionally. We have recognized from the earliest days in all the states, that the education of the young is a matter for state concern. If that be true, if that be accepted as a recognized principle of American government, we must take the next step. We have already taken one step. Practically all the schools, practically all the states of the nation are recognizing physical education as well as mental. If that be so, if the states today in their physical and mental educational work, are recognizing, and they are doing it increasingly, that they must attend to the individual needs of the individual child, then the next step which is going to be a part of our government is the recognition of the duty of the state to bring these children, physically handicapped, back to a more normal life.

We don't want to institutionalize ourselves. We don't want to make ourselves the slaves of a bureaucracy. Today a large part of the work is being conducted, I believe, by private organizations. It is being carried on by private gifts. That must not stop, but at the same time, we, as citizens of our several states, have the right to go to the law-makers and to the executives of our state, and insist that the state fails to perform one of its functions of government, if it fails to aid in this kind of work.

Fifty million dollars a year, the interest on what the cripples might make every year -- well, we are accustomed to high taxes. We are accustomed to cheerful giving, and the best part that has come to me at this great gathering is the fact that we are all working together. I have in mind the preparation of figures, of facts which can go out to the communities.

I was talking to one of the eminent surgeons who was at this gathering yesterday, and he brought that point out to me very clearly. He was talking about the practical business man, about the need for figures to show how much work was necessary on the average child, on some system of information, of charting our results. Today you and I are familiar with this lack of figures. When a man comes to me to talk about our work down at Warm Springs in Georgia, it is very difficult to tell him how long such-and-such a case will take, how much it will cost, and of the experience in other places. We need figures and facts. Each of you in your own particular line of work knows your figures. How much are we finding out about our associate's figures in other places? That is a work for the future, for the immediate future, I hope -- a comparison, a testing, a charting of our results. We hear that such-and-such a hospital or such-and-such a state system is working splendidly. We hear that they have taken so many children, that they have done this, that or the other work, but that is information for us, for us specialists. It isn't for the average layman.

Another thing, when I think of the great areas of this country where the cripple is not receiving any attention; when I think of the very large proportion of that 400,000 who haven't the facilities, who don't know where to go; when I think that every day, not of the one letter but the ten coming from all parts of the nation, and from foreign countries as well asking what can be done, asking, in most cases, for free treatment or practically free treatment, -- people without the means to pay the cost -- then it is felt more forcible than ever, that, in a large measure, this problem is a concern of the government; it is concern of the average taxpayer. They are going to realize in this generation the economic value of paying taxes for work. We tax ourselves for public parks; we tax ourselves for national reservations; we tax ourselves for the work of destroying the animal pests that infect our crops and our forests. We are willing by Federal Government and by state government to pour millions into the eradication of the animal pests that prey upon our pocketbooks, because we can feel what the boll weevil does to them; we can't feel, in the same way, what the germ of anterior poliomyelitis does to our pocketbooks; but it is there just the same, and it is just as real, and it is hurting our pocketbooks in the same way.