12 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



provement of social conditions — the general welfare. It is no more than simple 

 justice to credit the State Horticultural Society of Missouri with all these high 

 aims in its comprehensive enterprise and beneficence. 



We welcome you because you represent and foster an interest inseparable 

 from the most ancient and honorable of human vocations — agriculture. Horticul- 

 ture, particularly in our great West, is practically a department of agriculture. 

 It might be well if we were educated to the point of making horticulture a 

 specialty. No doubt the State Horticultural Society and the Agricultural Experi- 

 ment Station have given and will continue to give this subject due consideration. 

 The present conditions of agriculture and the prospects for the agricuturist seem 

 to suggest the necessity for some modification?, if not revolution, in western 

 farm methods. We have for years been hoping against hope, looking for some 

 turn in affairs that might bring to the farmer a fair recompense for his investment 

 of money and labor. A greater diversity of pursuit may be a necessity. It is 

 no more than a natural inquiry of horticulture : how far can it be brought to the 

 relief of agriculture ? Do our soil and climatic conditions and our relation to the 

 great markets encourage the appropriation of large areas of land to fruit-growing? 



It seems appropriate to this occasion to recall the attention of horticulturists 

 to the rapidly growing tendency of population to our towns and cities. The increase 

 of urban population and the growing demand for vegetable and fruit diet must in- 

 troduce the horticulturists to the front ranks of the producers of the world's euc- 

 teaation. 



The day for the compact and elHcient organization of the different departments 

 of production has come and now is. I do not know how better the interest of pro* 

 duction can be advanced and protected than by mutual instruction and fraternal 

 co-operation. 



We welcome you because Columbia people are especially interested in every 

 well-devised means for the development and perfection of the higher phases of 

 human life. I indulge in no unwarrantable spirit of local pride when I claim for 

 this community an unusual public spirit and disinterested magnanimity in educa- 

 tional enterprises and institutions. An intelligent apprehension of h orticulture^ 

 from a scientific as well as a social and utilitarian point of view, recognizes in it 

 an educational force. 



The study of botanical biology in connection with entomology leads the mind 

 up to an intelligent appreciation of its wonderful and beautiful law by which the 

 varied economy of nature is ruled. No one can understand the fructifying forces 

 of soil constituents, climatic conditions and cultivation of fruit-bearing vegetation, 

 without an appreciable development of the faculties of mind and soul. Education 

 means more than the traditional school instruction and conventional scholastic 

 methods. Man needs the cultivation, expansion and refinement of all the vast 

 capabilities, all the marvelous powers, of his complex being. He must be lifted up 

 to an intelligent co-operation with the unity of law that pervades the realm of the 

 natural and the spiritual. He must be able to enter into sympathy with the har- 

 taonious blending of the useful and the beautiful. 



He who sees noticing but pennies in the blushing pyrus, nothing but nickels 

 in the tempting nectarine, nothing but cents in the sweet-scented plum bloom, 

 and only greenbacks in the gensrous clusters of grapes, can see no excellency in 

 human virtue and no merit in magnanimity. He who sees no charms in the lotus, 

 no loveliness in the Mareschal Niel, no smiles in the hyancith, cannot be charmed 

 by the graces and perfectness of human life. 



