454 ■ ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



than twelve hundred million people, a hundred million of whom should live 

 in Illinois. Under these conditions not less than thirty millions should live 

 in the State of Maine— that is, the population of the entire United States 

 at the time of the Civil War would then be crowded into a single one of our 

 smaller states, and that within tlys present contury. 



"For various reasons this ratio of increase cannot much longer be main- 

 tained, yet it is the natural rate, and it tends to show us what would come 

 about under normal conditions within a century — and what is a century in 

 the life history of a people? 



"Believe me, race suicide if it comes will be due not to a failure of the 

 birth rate: it will be from our sheer neglect to maintain conditions that will 

 insure food for the people. This is the form of race suicide against which we 

 need most to protect ourselves, and it is none too soon to begin. The world has 

 not yet learned how to feed such a population as is just ahead and before 

 the present century is ended the largest single public issue will be that of 

 bread. 



"Within the life-time of children born today, scarcity of labor will be a 

 matter of history, and abundance of cheap food will be a tale that is told 

 by the grandfather in his chimney corner dozing in his dotage. We are edu- 

 cating in our schools today a generation of childern to live a life that we 

 ourselves have never seen and that history does not record, and we do well 

 if we soberly calculate what their conditions of life are likely to be and mend 

 our methods accordingly. 



"We were three hundred years in getting a population of five millions of 

 people, so slowly do numbers pile up when the base is small, whatever the 

 ratio, but we have increased ninety millions in the last hundred years. With 

 such a base and with modern conditions of life, this country can and will 

 produce men at a rate the world has never seen. We can now produce in 

 this country as much increased population in the next twenty-five years as we 

 produced in the whole four hundred years since its discovery by white men, 

 and we can produce twice as many more in the next twenty-five. In fifty years 

 from now we shall have the population of China in this country, unless some- 

 thing goes wrong, and it is the business of agriculture to learn how to feed 

 them. When it has learned this, it will have learned many a lesson the 

 colleges do not now know how to teach." 



ADDKESS OF GENERAL BEAVER 



Mr, Chairman and Gentlemen: I am very glad to be with you 

 again. I merely stopped in on my way from one of the other meet- 

 ings. There is no particular subject for me to speak on that I know 

 of, but I confess that I have been tremenduously wakened up since 

 coming to Harrisburg, particularly in view of the horticultural ex- 

 hibition over at Johnston's Hall. Well, there is no discounting that 

 exhibition, 1 tell you. I think it is somewhere about ten years ago 

 that we were bewailing not only the business but the decadence of 

 what little horticulture we had in Pennsylvania, and now you go 

 into that great fruit store in Philadelphia where you can pay a half 

 dollar a pound for hothouse grapes and ten cents a piece for Wash- 

 ington and Oregon apples and you will not see anything that will 

 compare in color or quality or taste — because I had one last night — 

 with what you find over here at the show, and if we give attention 

 to the necessities and demands of Pomology in the way of soil and 

 treatment, we are likely I think to stand at the very head of the 

 ajjple producing regions of the United States. There is no reason 

 why we could not be, for we produce just as good and better apples 

 than you will find at the big fruit store in Philadelphia that were 

 raised in California or Oregon. 



I was talking with Mr. Tyson, one of our great growers, and I 

 asked him whether he sold his apples at wholesale, and he said, no, he 

 did better than that; that he got his price; that he had a market 

 for every bit of his product by sending boxes directly to the con- 



