Rear-Platform Remarks at Bloomington, Ill

My friends, I am glad to come to Bloomingburgh and I am glad to be on this platform with my old friends, Senator Lewis and Governor Horner.

I think I am right in saying that you people live in a country which is the second in all the United States in the value of its agricultural production.

On this trip I have been finding some ghosts. When I was farther out West I found that people were going around telling about the ghosts of taxes. They were telling people that if I were reelected, I was going to impose a Federal tax, in some perfectly weird, ghost-like manner, on every farm and home in the United States.

But, luckily, my friends, there are not many actual believers in ghosts these days. Today, when I came into Illinois I found that a new ghost has been raised up before your faces. I am not worried. It is a new one, though. They tell you in this State, I understand, that I propose that no loans shall be made on any farm land for more than twenty-five dollars an acre.

Well, let us look at that picture for a minute. If I were lending money on farm land, the first question I would ask is, "How much can that land produce?" I own some farm land myself. Down in the State of Georgia I have a lot of land that I would not lend five dollars an acre on. But, up on the Hudson River, I have some pretty good land on which I would gladly lend a hundred dollars an acre. That kind of ghost in a political campaign always comes back on the fellow who raised it, for the simple reason that the people in this country have a lot more sense than some give them credit for.

During the last three years and a half, I believe that one of the greatest gains made by the United States has been the fact that more men and women of voting age— and I include in that statement some of them below voting age—are taking a more intelligent interest in their Government than ever before in our history.

There are some people in the United States who would like to turn the conduct of Government over to a selected, self-chosen few. I would rather leave it in the hands of what we call the democracy of the United States.

In the past three and a half years, we have gone a long way and in the next four years we are going even further. That is why, my friends, on the night of November 3rd next, I have not the least worry about what the telephone and telegraph are going to carry to me as the message of the people of the State of Illinois.

Mrs. Roosevelt wants me to thank you very much for these perfectly grand flowers and also for the box of candy.

Good-bye and good luck.