FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



to enforce loyalty on the part of public officials, or at least to 

 prevent an insidious form of bribery. 



I have served under many of the heads of the Department of 

 Agriculture. In the old days, such an official was called the 

 Commissioner of Agriculture, and the department itself was 

 not a full-fledged department. It was one of the so-called inde- 

 pendent offices, and was not represented in the Cabinet. Dur- 

 ing President Cleveland's first administration, however, it was 

 made a cabinet office, and since then the head man in the depart- 

 ment has been called Secretary of Agriculture. I have served 

 under nine or ten of them, including no less than twelve years 

 under Secretary James Wilson, the longest period in the history 

 of the republic for which a Cabinet minister has held office. 



When I first came to Washington in November, 1878, General 

 William G. Le Due of Minnesota was Commissioner. He signed 

 my first commission. It is a beautiful indication of a youth's 

 wrong estimate of time, that then, at the age of twenty-one, I 

 looked upon the General as a man of advanced years. He must, 

 however, have been only fifty-five, since when he died, in 1917, 

 his age was given as ninety-four. Perhaps, after all, an outdoor 

 life and golf keep a man young for a longer time than was 

 formerly the case. I saw very little of General Le Due during 

 his term of office, but once in a while he used to come up to 

 the rooms occupied by the entomologists, bringing with him 

 some distinguished guest, usually a Westerner. He would walk 

 up to the insect collection contained in closed bookform boxes 

 on shelves, open a box that occupied a certain place, and show 

 his guest the then famous Rocky Mountain Locust that had 

 done millions of dollars' worth of damage to the West during 

 the years 1874 to 1876. The Department was a very small affair 

 in those days, and there was little to show guests, but the Gen- 



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