ANNUAL MEETING. 41 



The President appointed the following committees : 



Auditing Committee: Knode Porter, M. S. Claypool and Joe 

 Cunningham. 



Committee on Credentials : M. A. McDonald, Oscar Hadley 

 and W. T. Beauchamp. 



Vice-President, Mason J. ISTiblack, presided while the President 

 read his annual address, as follows : 



' PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



Gentlemen of the State Board of Agriculture: 



Your Board has had a year of pleutj', and it is facing a future that 

 is aglow with promise. You have an enterprise in your keeping that has 

 grown marvouslj' in these later jears and it is one which gives evidence 

 of much greater growth if you give it the same thought and care which 

 you have in the past bestowed upon it. Your last fair was your largest 

 and best one because of the energy you placed behind it, and because 

 of the ripe experience which you brought to its support. As a result, 

 you gave one of the few fairs which has enabled you to clean your 

 books of all obligations, have a neat balance with which to begin you 

 efforts this year and, in addition, you have paid off an old obligation of 

 $4,800. 



You accomplished much more than these things with your last 

 fair. You quickened public interest in your exhibition more than jou 

 ever did before. You have reached into the far corners of the State with 

 the doctrine that your fair is an v\plifting force, whose benefits spread 

 in all directions and to all classes of our population. It has been demon- 

 strated that agriculture and its kindred industries form the dominating 

 force which in recent years has been the greatest earner of material 

 wealth in Indiana. Through your own effort, through the kindness of 

 the public press, and through the word of the tiller of the soil and the 

 herder of the flocks, it has gone abroad that your State Fair was the 

 training school, the source of inspiration. Avliicli has led the farmer and 

 live-stock man to strive for greater things; and as he has accomplished 

 his ends, he has dispersed his gain until all the State has shared in it. 



I urge you to greater efforts to spread the word of what your Board 

 is, what its purposes are, what it has done and what it hopes to do. 

 Cast this bread upon the waters and in time it will come back to you 

 many fold. For fifty years your predecessors, as you are doing, fought 

 their financial battles alone and distributed their victories for the benefit 

 of people of high and low degi'ee throughout our commonwealth, each 

 year lifting Indiana into higher rank and into greater wealth as an 



