132 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



redeem the world, by showing to humanity that which is mostinnocent, 

 purest and best. 



There is no branch of agriculture in which I take more interest of 

 necessity, there is none in which man ought to be more interested, 

 from the very highest of cousiderations, than thar very branch which 

 you represent. The dwellers of the hardy North must more and more 

 eschew a vegetable diet, and we find in all ages of the world, as w& 

 have departed from the polar regions, as we have found our way to 

 where the genial sun shines, and the earth gives back its splendor, just 

 in this proportion do we find the bounty of Mother Earth more and 

 more magnified and multiplied, and life to have reached its very highest 

 possibility. 



The largest and best civilizations of the world have always been 

 under a tropical sun. The civilization of the olden days concentrated 

 itself around the Mediterranean Sea. All the pulsations of life ia 

 Central Africa extended to the shores of the Mediterranean and every- 

 thing that belonged to brain or brawn expressed itself in its highest 

 endeavor upon the shores of that sea. On its eastern and northern 

 boundary the Goths and Vandals hurled themselves upon the dwellers 

 upon its shores in the endeavor to reach the civilization which wa» 

 then in its divinest expression there, and where everything offered 

 advantages which the cold and frozen regions in which they had starved 

 and fought like wild beasts had not given them. They hurled them- 

 selves upon the gentle sons of the south, not with a fiendish disposi- 

 tion to destroy, but because they saw them in possession of a clime 

 and soil which they recognized as being next to the very garden of 

 God, and so, sir, I return to say, that man has gained his very highest 

 ideas, he has achieved the very divinest results under a tropical sun. 



History repeats itself, and I do not expect in the years to come 

 that there will ever be evidenced near the polar circle, anything be- 

 longing to a higher nature, which is calulated to distinguish humanity. 

 Never has a Milton, a Shakespere, a Webster, a Columbus, a Ceasar or 

 an Alexander, never has a man distinguished among his fellow men by 

 intellect, never has a man capable of leading the armies of humanity 

 come out of the frozen north. We rejoice in our glorious America, in 

 this United States, situated sufficiently near the tropics to obtain their 

 general warmth, and yet separated from all that tends to enervate. 

 For this reason our country has produced fairer daughters and braver 

 sons than the world has ever known, and I look before me for yet 

 grander results than any which we rejoice at the present time. But, 

 sir, the thought which led me astray was this ; that precisely in propor- 

 tion as the arts of war decay and the arts of peace flourish, precisely 



