86 State Horticultural Society. 



lants is but the result of starvation in the individual or his ancestry — 

 starvation from lack of quantity or quality of food or from the inability 

 to digest it. But by many people it will be said that the normal body 

 may be trained to crave a stimulant, that the habit may be acquired 

 though the individual have the best of food. Under those conditions the 

 body repels the stimulant at first. It must be taken again and again 

 before it can be endured. This repeated forcing of the system to accept 

 what it repels impairs the digestion, and the body fails to appropriate the 

 necessary nourishment from the food taken and becomes imperfectl}' 

 nourished and finally yields to the will, accepting a stimulant instead of a 

 complete nourishment. That the eating of fruits has a tendency to re- 

 move an acquired or hereditary craving for stimulants by placing the 

 system in a more healthy condition has long been known to scientists. 

 Even the casual observer may prove the fact for himself by comparing 

 an assembly of horticulturists with an assembly of doctors, lawyers, edi- 

 tors, general farmers or men of any other calling. If the face and form 

 of a drunkard is seen in a horticultural society he is at once judged 

 as having come for some purpose aside from horticultural interests, that 

 he does not properly belong in that crowd. When agriculture and horti- 

 culture have reached their highest development and attained their proper 

 appreciation, drunkenness will vanish. There will be no need for prohi- 

 bition laws and temperance societies, no more need for preaching and 

 lecturing on the subject than there is for talking against dueling or the 

 killing of those supposed to be connected with witchcraft. The school 

 garden, the point from which the first steps in agriculture and horticulture 

 should be taken, may be made the beginning of this needed reform. If 

 but a portion of the vacant lands were tilled and made to produce the best 

 and most that they could yield, all might be well fed, and future genera- 

 tions might inhabit the earth with healthy bodies, freed from the craving 

 for intoxicants. 



The Missouri Building at the World's Fair has vanished from our 

 view forever, but may the impression made by its mural decorations 

 never vanish from the mind of man — the different epochs through which 

 he has passed, from the lowest state of barbarity to the highest state of 

 civilization — the personification of liberty with the grains, fruits and 

 flowers hand in hand with the book of knowledge guided by the light of 

 science. 



