202 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



New York, we find thai the people in some of tin. sweat-shop dis- 

 t litis arc beginning to ask and want a home in the country. This 

 is largely due to the fact that the telephone is connected with the 

 home — has connected their business interests with the home in the 

 country to such an extent that the busy man in Wall Street or the 

 busy agricultural editor can live in the country and still conduct 

 his business by keeping his finger on every detail of his business, 

 although he may live miles away, which has been made possible 

 through the electric trolley, a condition which ten or fifteen years 

 ago was practically impossible, and a man can live in a little hamlet 

 or village now at five, ten, fifteen or even thirty miles distant from 

 his business, and still go backward and forward to his office. The 

 tendency is back to the land, and it behooves us as interested in all 

 these movements to build up and lift ourselves higher in the scale 

 than we have ever been before. From what I have said, my friends, 

 you will see that the attention of the people in the cities has been 

 turned away from those specific lines of work in which they have been 

 engaged, back to the country; hence I say that I believe within the 

 next ten years we shall see a greater advance along these lines than 

 we have ever seen before. 



I want to leave one word with you and that is this: This is 

 primarily a day of observation. There is a great difference between 

 observation and imagination. A little story will illustrate this: 

 While traveling in the South I came across an old colored man who 

 was said to have been the best shot in that whole county, and the old 

 man prided himself on the fact that he never failed when he pulled a 

 trigger on a 'possum; he always brought him down. As the story 

 goes, he started out one afternoon on a 'possum hunt with one Bill 

 Jones and they came up to a very large tree in an open field and out 

 on a limb ten or twelve feet from the ground, the old colored man 

 saw, or imagined he saw one of the largest and fattest 'possums he 

 had seen in ail his life. Drawing up his rifle he pulled the trigger 

 but no 'possum came down. Now Sam's friend, Jones, grew rather 

 suspicious. He looked at the tree carefully but could not see any 

 signs of a 'possum, and he turned around to the old colored man 

 and said, "Sam, I tell you there is no 'possum in that tree." "O," said 

 Sam, "my eyes never failed me. I've killed nigh onto three hundred 

 'possums in my day, and I'm going to try it once more." So the old 

 gentleman loaded up again, raised his rifle, pulled the trigger again 

 but no 'possum came down. Then his friend Jones walked around 

 a while, looked at the tree and thought there must be something 

 wrong with the upper part of old Sam's head, and he looked him 

 over carefully and away out on the end of his eyebrow there was a 

 louse, a product of his own head, a concrete example of imagination. 

 On the other hand, in the case of Jones we have one of the best ex- 



