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Show IOWA'S BABY CROP. Iowa gives 60,000 Republican majority. Our schools are more numerous and better attended than in any other State. Our churches show a healthy religious feeling. Our farmers are industrious. Iowa makes more butter, raises more hogs, and equals any State in the country, almost, in our corn and wheat product. We have more newspapers and periodicals than any State in the West, and every one of them is readable. Our manufactories are numerous and growing. The State is gridironed with railroads. The landscape on all sides is spread out in meadows, upon whose nutritious grass large herds of cattle are feeding or is dotted with productive farms, whose bursting granaries give evidence, and whose farm houses give signs of plenty and content. Our cities are booming with business. Merchants and farmers, manufacturers and workingmen, in all vocations, find enough to do and are repaid for doing it. These signs of prosperity are so common that our people are unmindful of the strides forward that the State is making. Immigration for the last season was large, and the indications for next year are that the tide will set this way in immense numbers. The class of people who have come among us are substantial in means and energy. But all these signs of prosperity, as magnificent as they may be, are eclipsed by one which passes unnoticed as an every-day occurrence. We have gotten used to it, so to speak, and since Adam and Eve's time the human family have had time to get used to it. Babies we are speaking of. Iowa excels any State in the Union for babies. First and foremost, to the population, we have more births than any other country in or out of the United States that the sun shines on. There are big uncanny babies. A nine-pound baby in Iowa does not get a newspaper notice; a ten or twelve-pound infant gets a word or two of mention, but we do brag about our twenty-pounders, their size, of course, and of their numbers too. Every State newspaper, of which we have several hundred, have weekly mentions to half a dozen or more in number, of "how Tom Jones is steping high," and closes up the mention with the significant word "baby." "Did any get away?" is another form of announcement, for twins are frequent and triplets not uncommon in Iowa. The fact is, what portion of his paper that is not devoted to the farming or other local interests of his constituency, the country editor is compelled to give up to chronicling the arrival of babies. This fall's crop, for instance, would paralyze the census man, who lounged through the count last June, were he to come around these times. To sum it up, this record of births indicates that our prosperity and population for the decade will astonish the census man of 1890. We might incidentally mention, in immediate connection with the foregoing, that the county clerks throughout the State have little time for anything else than the recording of marriage licenses. Altogether, Iowa is proud of her prosperous present, and has the babies to keep it up. In enumerating our many and conspicuous blessings, we have omitted, as inappropriate to the genius of the article, to say anything about our ?? fuel? Famine. --[Sioux City Journal. |