128 TRANSACTIONS OF TMK ILLTXOTS 



would be advanced in many ways. In seasons of plenty, there would 

 be no longer complaint that the markets are glutted, and the prices 

 ruined by the immense pressure of quantities of green fruit. In seasons 

 of scarcity the choice selections of the orchard would command prices 

 to compensate for the diminished harvest. It is not the amount of fruit 

 that determines the farmers' income, so much as the quality, and the man- 

 ner in which it is marketed. I know many fruit farmers who raise and 

 ship less than their neighbors, yet who always realize a larger aggregate 

 money value on their crops. 



The principle involved is true in all varieties of farming and in 

 every department of human activity. Take the various States in the 

 Union as illustrations. You will find each State prosperous not in pro- 

 portion to the actual amount of its resources, but just in the measure in 

 which its resources have been carefully developed. Success in life is no- 

 where achieved by the sole possession of resources, however large, but 

 rather by the wise husbandry and development of the means at our 

 command. 



Now, permit a few statements in relation to facts of experience in 

 utilizing fruit. For five years I have personally and practically superin- 

 tended, each season, an Alden factory for evaporating fruits, and have 

 produced from twenty-five thousand to seventy-five thousand pounds 

 Alden product each year. When our own factory was started, the Alden 

 fruit, which is now known and quoted by its distinctive name in all the 

 leading markets, was yet new and untried, and I was laughed at by 

 wholesale grocers in Chicago for asking them to buy Alden apples at 

 twenty cents (ten per cent. off). Dried apples, they assured me, could 

 never be sold at any such prices ; yet one house in Chicago which, five 

 years ago, derided the possibility of any sale at such figures, last year 

 bought and used, in their own trade, sixty thousand pounds Alden apples. 

 This year, although the legitimate season for dried fruit has not yet even 

 begun, this same firm has already disjiosed of over twenty thousand 

 pounds, at twenty cents (ten per cent. off). The United States Govern- 

 ment uses hundreds of thousands of pounds now yearly, and, during the 

 past year, several cargoes, larger or smaller, have been shipped to Europe 

 and Australia. The increasing demand for Alden fruit affords the 

 solution to the problem : What disposition shall we make of our surplus 

 and second-grade fruits. The reduction in the expense of evaporators 

 for conversion in the cost of preparing fruit, and the simplification of all 

 the details of the operation of an Alden evaporator, have been such that 

 the Alden process is now within the reach of the majority of fruit growers. 

 After five years' actual manufactory experience in developing and per- 

 fecting methods of operation by the hundreds who are now using Alden 

 evaporators, there can no longer remain any uncertainty of their success. 

 They are no longer an experiment. The recognition of a name and 

 establishment of a market for Alden fruit has been the work of time and 

 great expense, yet it has been triumphantly achieved. 



Last year the canned and dried fruit markets, especially the former, 

 were completely demoralized, yet Alden apples and peaclies not only 



