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Show President's Farmer Tenant Has Trouble All His Own Newsmen Quoted Mose Smith, Who Works 140-Acre Hyde Park Farm, and He Doesn't Like It at All. KIIAGE ; Tie Hour Commentator. told her about this house being over a hundred years old and I told him about the well-water. It had gone bad. So he said to go ahead and dig a new welL" Smith showed me the new well. It is 140 feet deep, drilled through the rock. Smith was proud of it Up Dutchess County way they have a pride in old things that are good. "It will last a hundred years," Smith said with obvious satisfaction. satisfac-tion. Two Things Worry Him. Smith does general farming raises wheat, oats, corn, potatoes and vegetables and keeps 14 cows. He has a good home market close by and he raises enough vegetables for himself. There were two things which were worrying Smith when I talked to him. One which every farmer worries wor-ries about these days getting help. And another which is the particular worry of a tenant of a President. Every year the Home club meets on the Smith lawn, a group of some four or five hundred Hyde Parkers (incidentally I understand these people are really the ones the President Pres-ident likes the most). This year something happened that worried Smith. As host he made an introductory speech. He told me that he looked around and saw there weren't any microphones and concluded that as long as this was a home gathering he could say what he pleased without with-out being quoted in the papers. He got a little excited, he told me, and said something about wishing wish-ing the interventionists would en un By BATJ National Farm and Hoi WNU Service, 1343 H Street, N-W, Washington, D. C. I suppose the landlord-loving tenant ten-ant is as much a piece of news as the dog-biting man. So when a famous fa-mous landlord made the following remark about a certain farmer, I decided the matter ought to be looked into: "I don't know whether I like being be-ing called a landlord," said the landlord. land-lord. "I say this, though, that if I have to be a landlord, and if he has to be a tenant, I would rather have Moses (Smith) as a tenant than any man I know ... he has not cut down the trees; he has not burned up the house; and the fields are in better condition than the day he came. And, incidentally, from my point of view, all the time that Moses has been here, he has never given me a headache." That is what President Roosevelt said about Moses Smith. So I dropped in and had a talk with Mr. Smith when I was up at Hyde Park recently. This is what Mr. Smith said to me: "The President is the best landlord land-lord in the United States. I've rented rent-ed from him for 22 years and he has yet to find fault. Whenever he gets a chance he comes over here to say 'hello' and 'good-by,' but he doesn't find fault. And I've made mistakes, too. Nobody is perfect." And Smith sounded sincere. There is nothing self-conscious about his relationship with the President to Smith, Franklin Roosevelt seems simply the son of a landlord who has grown up to inherit the func- on a mountain and talk themselves to death. Next day he was shocked to see his words in print. And he got a lot of letters protesting. He explained to me very earnestly earnest-ly that he didn't mean to say that anybody could not say what they, wanted to under the Constitution. "I suppose it's all right that they should," he said, "but it just seemed to me that when these people talk that way and show dissention in the country they just encourage those people in Europe to prolong the war." "That's all I meant to say," he concluded, "I never had any idea a reporter would go and put it in the paper." , ! Smith does not think they should have put it in the paper at all even if he is the tenant of the land- 4 Jtajy .-.---- :;:::: 1 -,S rr- TV"! l V lord that he is. Rusting Rail Look Quite Attractive Now Since Uncle Sam has turned junkman junk-man and is crying for scrap iron, attention at-tention of the defense agencies is turning toward some of those rusty rails which used to be bright and shiny before the fliwer and the truck took away their business. A quarter of all the iron scrap which goes into the manufacture of steel normally comes from the railroads, rail-roads, and scrap makes up 50 per cent of the basic raw material of steel. According to recent reports, 98 per cent of all traffic is carried on 70 per cent of the mileage of the railroads of the country. The roads would be glad enough to get rid of the rusty rails which carry little or no traffic and the government would be glad to tap this source for tanks and ships and guns if it were available. avail-able. However, when formal steps are taken to abandon a branch line there is usually a strong protest from the citizens of a communit)' through wh,ich it passes. Recently a representative of the Interstate Commerce commission was holding a hearing at a town distant from Washington. Many persons per-sons from the community were present as witnesses protesting the abandonment of a branch road which went through it. There was a dispute as to how much the road was used by the i community so the ICC representative representa-tive asked all those who had come to protest against the abandonment of the line who had come to the meeting by auto, truck or bus . to raise their hands. All the hands went up. None had used the rail-roarl. rail-roarl. With the call for more steel for national defense, Washington is looking look-ing with hungry eyes at the rusting rails. Meeting of the Home club at home of Moses Smith recently. tions of his mother and who, purely incidentally, has become President. When I got out of the car in the driveway beside the neat little white farmhouse with its pillared porch. Smith walked out to meet me. He is a typical up-state New York farmer. farm-er. He was dressed in two-piece overalls he told me he had just "dressed three fowls" and I knew that morning he had been spreading fertilizer. Bright brown eyes looked out under the wide brim of his straw hat the kind "Ding's" farmers wear. He took it off and I saw that his hair was not gray as I judged his years would indicate, but weathered a bit, like good lumber lum-ber that has been exposed to sun and wind and rain. House Expands Backward. We did not walk over the 140 acres which make up the place. They are typical of that part of the country, some pretty hilly, some flat soil that is spread not too deeply deep-ly over the hard rock, of the sort that makes the Palisades. Flat field stone has provided the stone walls and material for the build- i ings. Smith asked me in out of the sun which was filtering through the great trees in the yard. We went in the back door which was handiest. "It's a long way," he said, "from the parlor to the kitchen." It was. The house had expanded backward evidently instead of spreading out Convenient in winter though, not so long a path to have to shovel to the barn. We sat down in the parlor and the conversation started on the landlord-tenant subject. Smith had reached the point where he was telling tell-ing his side of the story: "Now the President drove over here a little while back. Smith went on, "with the Princess Juliana. He |