FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 85 



and if we can succeed in getting one sweet orange, we can multiply it. 

 We did get something interesting, we got several very fine orange plants, 

 but that is the way you get varieties, you do not know what is coming. 

 You don't need to hybridize when you reach perfection. Our corn 

 fields in the west have been immensely improved by the one process 

 of selection. We select our seed corn with a great deal of care. The 

 department of agriculture carries on this work in conjunction with the 

 experiment stations in the several states. You all know what macaroni is. 

 It has never been made in the United vStates successfully because we did 

 not have the wheat to make it from. It is entirely different from bread 

 wheat. It grows in the semi-arid regions of Europe and Asia and it is 

 very different from that of bread wheat. We have been importing it 

 for the purpose of getting a crop that would grow here. A mill has been 

 started in Cleveland, Ohio, for the purpose of making American macaroni. 

 It could only buy 15,000 bushels because the farmers refuse to sell any 

 more. Next year, however, we wall make our own macaroni and you will 

 have a clean dish without any of the bacteria of lower Italy in it. 



We set out in our department to lower the amount of produce we are 

 buying from foreign countries. In 1900 we bought 440 million dollars 

 worth of stuff from foreign fields, and raised 840 million dollars worth. 

 My job is to help the American farmer to produce that 440 million. 

 One-half of that amount can be produced in the United States and the 

 other half can be produced in the tropical countries. The brown men 

 who live in the tropics are being taught how to produce 200 million 

 dollars worth, so that they will have the money to buy the things we make 

 here. We have just sent men to the Philippine islands to teach those 

 people to produce what we cannot produce. 



Let alone the things w^e can produce here, because the American farmer 

 is going to be entirely irresistible in regard to what he can do. There 

 are a few things that we cannot produce. We cannot produce rubber, 

 we cannot produce spices, and these things I am proposing to teach the 

 brown men of the tropics so they will have pocket money to deal with 

 us. In regard to other things, sugar, etc., it is only a question of time 

 till w^e will produce them. The people down along the Gulf of Mexico 

 set up a Macedonian cry that they Avere trying to grow rice and didn't 

 have the right kind, four years ago now, and they wanted help. Their 

 rice was carbonaceous and some forty-seven per cent Of it broke up in the 

 threshing. The department of agriculture thought a rice might be found 

 somewhere in the earth that would be more nitrogenous, more flinty and 

 not break up so much in the threshing. As soon as they found what 

 They wanted, they produced all the rice used in the United States, and 

 next year we will begin to export rice. 



Down in South Carolina away back in the time of one of my prede- 

 cessors, twenty or thirty years ago, an attempt was made to grow tea. 

 They got the plants, got the land, and put them in charge of a theological 

 student who spent part of the time in studying and the other part in 

 cultivating tea. The tea business w^as a failure. I made some inquiry 

 into the conditions and found that there was quite a prospect of pro- 

 ducing our own tea in the United States. We buy some years 11 million 

 dollars worth and some years 14 millions. I found an intelligent gentle- 

 man to take charge of the plantation. He told his colored neighbors 

 that he would send their children to school, but they must pick his tea 

 for him two days in the week and he would pay them. I saw that 



