■."'I 



ii o i; T i c r lt i i: i 



March 15. 1919 



CARNATIONS, IDEALS, SUCCESS 



Paper by M. J. Brinton, Read Before the Florist Club of Philadelphia at its March Meeting 



By way of introduction I wish to 

 say. I cannot assume the responsibil- 

 ity of telling this gathering how to 

 grow such flowers as you have here on 

 the exhibition table. I want to omit 

 soils, temperatures, antidotes for in- 

 sect and other enemies. What I wish 

 to say is of the man who grows them, 

 handles them and even uses them. 



The history of the Divine flower, 

 from its birth through all the varied 

 degrees of its development as it stands 

 before you this evening, has been re- 

 hearsed, discussed and ably described 

 before this club. 



There may be recent discoveries of 

 means for propagation and cultural 

 methods of which I am not familiar 

 and of which some of you have not yet 

 heard. I shall have to leave it to him 

 who does know to tell you of them. 



Where it has been my privilege to 

 see this flower at its best, success 

 has been attained by methods that are 

 common knowledge to most of you. 



This word "Success'' has varied 

 meanings. What does it mean to you? 

 Analyze it from your individual view- 

 point. Is it the volume of worldly 

 possessions alone that you or your 

 neighbor have been able to accumu- 

 late? Suppose we grant that this is 

 the ordinary conceplion of its mean- 

 ing. Therefore, any man, who has 

 been able to maintain an economic bal- 

 ance throughout his life, is a success 

 to a greater or less degree. A 50-50 

 man represents the lowest degree of 

 success on this basis for our rating: 

 he has been able to quit square. Statis- 

 tics reveal some startling records rel- 

 ative to human effort and its relation 

 to this balance. 



To the Insurance companies, with 

 their perfected organizations and their 

 intimate knowledge of the personal 

 affairs of millions of us. we can refer 

 for these facts. Beginning with a hun- 

 dred average men. age 25; we find, 

 thirty-five years later, thirty-six are 

 dead, fifty-three are dependent on rel- 

 atives or charty, six are self-support- 

 ing, and five are well-off. When all 

 have passed over the Great Divide, 

 sixty-seven had been dependent upon 

 someone else to defray funeral ex- 

 penses, and only five had estates ex- 

 ceeding $5,000. 



This is not. a particularly cheerful 

 outlook for the young man who is just 

 getting well started at 25. 



What is the cause of this condition? 

 Is it lack of education? Is it because 

 we are not willing to make the per- 

 sonal sacrifice to be in this select class 

 of 5 per cent? Are we over-ambitious 

 and take risks that can break or 

 cripple us. if we have erred in judg- 

 ment? Are we too easily influenced by 

 salos agencies, regardless of the 

 method used to reach our pocket- 

 books? 



In answer to your question, 'What 

 has this to do with carnations?" I 

 shall reply, — that the rudiments of 

 success are not materially different in 

 the production of this article of trade 



from that of any other. — It is the fore- 

 seeing and forestalling of the factors 

 that hinder the highest development. 

 It is the man who can check his 

 troubles when they are in their in- 

 fancy. — Almost any of us can effect 

 some sort of a cure, even though the 

 cure be as bad as the disease, but it 

 is the maintaining of conditions that 

 do not require a cure, that give us the 

 best and most consistent returns. 



While in the growing of carnations 

 there are seasons and elements over 

 which we do not have control, and at 

 times I have tried to excuse myself for 

 not getting better results for these 

 reasons, but when I see all kinds of 

 houses and soils and seasons produc- 

 ing splendid results, I feel that finally 

 it is the man. I recently looked over 

 probably 12,000 plants of "White Per- 

 fection" that seemed to leave little to 

 ask for. Some of us thought this va- 

 riety had passed on to the list of dis- 

 cards. "The cause of success is in the 

 fellow who succeeds." 



The production and trial of new va- 

 rieties is interesting, is essential and 

 supplies us with something to look for- 

 ward to; it adds charm to the work. 

 However, as I look back to the days of 

 "Grace Wilder" and "Portia", and even 

 to "La Purity" and "Edwardsii", I be- 

 lieve it to be best to try out the new 

 candidates for favor in a limited way 

 until their value is pretty well estab- 

 lished. I shall not recall some of the 

 notable instances where much her- 

 alded varieties have become strewn on 

 the rocks of shy bloomers, weak stem, 

 poor color, broken calyx and bad keep- 

 ers. 



There is another kind of success: 

 it may be associated with material suc- 

 cess, but not necessarily to any 

 marked degree. It is the acheiving 

 of an ideal, — the realizing of the men- 

 tal conception that we regard as a 

 standard of excellence. 



Cannot it also be the answering to a 

 hope? Allow me to cite "Mrs. C. W. 

 Ward", "Matchless" and the master- 

 pieces from the hands of Fisher and 

 Dorner. Can we not look to these for 

 the answer to a hope as it applies to 

 our subject for this evening? Do we 

 not all owe a debt of gratitude to the 

 patience and skill of selection that has 

 produced these and other varieties 

 which have stood the test? It is the 

 services of these lovers of the beauti- 

 ful that we value too little. It is their 

 assembling of the qualities and beau- 

 ties usually seen in different individ- 

 uals of their kind, eliminating almost 

 everything defective, that has set these 

 men apart from the rest of us. These 

 are our super-men. Their efforts have 

 not been confined to limited hours. 

 The joy of realizing the ideal holds 

 them to years of painstaking care and 

 attention. 



Probably he. who has his heart in 

 his work and whose ambitions are not 

 too largely guided by a mercenary re- 

 turn, feels most keenly the last analy- 

 sis of this word success, "The attain- 



ment of one's aims and the realization 

 of one's personal possibilities." 



Every one has his ideals on some 

 subject and "it is the faculties of the 

 human mind that are the tools to pro- 

 duce them." 



We are living in a period of all 

 kinds of extreme, idealistic sugges- 

 tions. The hybridizer has his mental 

 picture of his perfect flower or fruit; 

 the mechanical genius, his flawless ma- 

 chine; the politician, a satisfied con- 

 stituency; the statesman, with his 

 Ideals of Government and control; the 

 libertine, who wants no restraint at 

 all; the social student with his Ideal 

 of Democracy, who says the masses 

 have the right to decide and deter- 

 mine. 



Have the knocks of business life 

 made some of us too practical? Some- 

 times I feel that within it all, so many 

 of us have become the foot-ball for the 

 others. 



From the beginning there have been 

 leaders of men, and let us hope until 

 the end there may be those whose 

 sight and vision are not clouded and 

 whose will is unyielding in the de- 

 fense of the just reward of diligent 

 service and of the home — the social 

 center. 



The super-man is not selected or 

 chosen; he asserts himself in every 

 field of effort. This is part of the 

 florist business; it is part of every 

 business and ours in particular. The 

 product of our work is dedicated to 

 the expression and preservation of 

 life's richest sentiments centered 

 around a stabilized home. 



The pendulum of human events 

 swings with the ideals of our super- 

 men, and he who can absorb the 

 shocks is the man that succeeds. 



The experimentor and theorist are 

 abroad. I think they must have had 

 a hand in the new import rulings: few 

 of us are such specialists that we are 

 not effected to a greater or less de- 

 gree by these decisions. 



Anything we can do for each other 

 will be beneficial, our interests are 

 mutual; there can be no store or 

 wholesaler without the grower, and 

 very few growers without these dis- 

 tributing agencies. Co-operation spells 

 success. 



What lesson can we gain from our 

 trials of the recent past? We were 

 then confronted by rulings, the wis- 

 dom of which I do not question, and 

 conditions that discouraged us all, 

 closing up some of the weaker ones en- 

 tirely. Let us look forward and be- 

 lieve difficulties are not made to break 

 us; every trying situation we can over- 

 come strengthens us for a harder one. 

 It is the weeding out process that 

 never ends. We have learned that the 

 man who can stay in the game has 

 been and will be rewarded for his de- 

 termination. 



There has been much comment in 

 our trade papers and elsewhere as to 

 the effect of high prices. Probably 

 each view-point represented the selfish 



