No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 353 



aside from the libiirniim the rhododendrons in the very prime of their 

 beauty and the pink and white hawthorn hedging the fields, and then, 

 too, the native goose or wind which is found in England and Scotland 

 and covered all the hillsides and meadow lands, and as we left Queens- 

 town and huiried on to breakfast in Cork we enjoyed the magnificent 

 beauty of this mass of yellow bloom as we looked from our car win- 

 dows.*^ In Ireland in striking contrast to all this natural beauty — 

 but in contrast to all this you find the most abject poverty that I have 

 ever seen and you find dunning behind your vehicle the little urchins 

 begging as long as their breath holds out and you hear them saying: 

 "Copper, sir; copper, sir;" until they can barely lisp It. 



I am not going to ask you to stay in Ireland more than just to take 

 a peep into the country fair and realize the way they handle their 

 stock in the markets. Once a month the country folk come in with 

 their cows and pigs and their children, which of course they do not 

 sell, but the livestock are brought for sale and they congregate in the 

 commons and opens and have a good social day of it as well as a profit- 

 able market auction. 



Then 1 am going to ask you to leave Ireland and travel across Scot- 

 land and up on the highlands and view the historic parts of Scotland. 

 Let us just pause at the Island of Ionia that Kobert Louis Stevenson 

 has made so famous and as we visit the battle fields remember the 

 stirring incidents of their time and all through we find an association 

 of history that gives a keener appreciation of the natural beauty of 

 the places. It may be interesting to tell you that while I was in Scot- 

 land I met there in Edinboro during the World's Missionary Con- 

 gress our great American orator, William Jennings Bryan, who was 

 the great orator of that occasion. I was also fortunate enough to be 

 a fellow passenger on the steamer with him in crossing the occean. 

 The morning after Mr. Bryan spoke in Edinburgh the thing that in- 

 terested me very much was the way the British papers spoke in re- 

 gard to it. Something like this appeared in the morning papers. As 

 you probably know, there was a limit of seven minutes to each speaker. 

 Even to those men who had spent ten years in gathering information 

 to present to that great congress was allotted only seven minutes to 

 give the results of their investigation. And the papers said that 

 in the seven minutes at the beginning the Britisher would begin by 

 apologizing for the very little that they can say in seven minutes 

 while at the end he would be found apologizing for the small amount 

 he would say in seven minutes. While the American would begin by 

 saying, '*I want to tell you such and such a thing," and by the time 

 he had reached the middle he had covered half of his subject and when 

 he had finished there was nothing left to say upon the subject. So T 

 think it is remarkable that the Britishers who have a good opinion of 

 their own people and their own oratory should pay the Americans 

 such a compliment as that in their local papers. 



The country I want you to travel longest in to-night is Norway. 

 We find a country not as much travelled as some others and so very 

 different from our own in appearance, in agricultural points and con- 

 trasting effects that it brings particular interest to the American 

 tourist. In the southern section of Norway we find mountains and 

 waterways and as we travel on the little boats and look up at the 

 mountains we have a feeling that there is nothing beyond the horizon 



23—6—1911 



