WINTER MEETING AT CARTHAGE. 139 



And now, dear friends and members, I hope you may see some 

 great improvement in our State work during the last years since we 

 met in this very same place and the President and myself were chosen 

 to lead in the work of horticulture in this grand State of ours. Pres- 

 ident Evans and myself have been a unit in all things pertaining to the 

 State Society or the State work. It has been a work of love and of 

 honor as well as one of labor and worry; time and again it has seemed 

 to us as if we could not succeed, but, tbanks to the hundreds of earnest 

 hoiticulturists, we have proven that merit will win, and our State now 

 stands second to none in the influence of its State Society or the good 

 accomplished by it. No State or no people have done as much for the 

 development of the fruit interest, or for the spreading out to the world 

 the wonderful fruit lands, which we have scattered more-abundantly 

 over the State than any other State in the Union. We have everything 

 to be proud about and nothing to make us ashamed. The best State 

 in the Union, the center of the galaxy, the best soils, the grandest 

 climate, the rivers and creeks, the forest and prairies, the hills and 

 vales, the mountains and valleys, the cities and villages, the products 

 of the mines, forests, mills, farms ; the stock, grains, grasses, fruit and 

 flowers, the coal, iron, zinc, lead, onyx, granite, and above all the 

 homes, and the people who have made the State to blossom as the 

 rose, one and all have united to make a State of which we may b& 

 proud indeed. 



. But this is but an inkling of what is to be or what can be made 

 out of our grand State. One of these days we expect to see train 

 after train load of fruit go out of our State to markets where we now 

 see barrels and carloads, the bringing into the State millions of dol- 

 lars to the enrichment of our fruit-growers and market gardeners. 



We point with pride, therefore, to the success of our State work,^ 

 and state to you in truth that the State has advanced more in the horti- 

 cultural work during these last ten years than in all the time previous, 

 and that the State Society has been the means of accomplishing this 

 work more than any or all others combined, and this has been the 

 result of your work in unison with one another and the Society. Shall 

 I say more? You are a part of this success as well as the President 

 or other officers of the Society, and all it needs in the future is the 

 united action of every member, working in unison in the future as in 

 the past, and you know as well as I that it needs no prophet to see 

 that the result will be greater in the next ten years than has been in the 

 past. To this end we will work with might and main, sure of the 

 results which will follow. L. A. Goodman. 



