INDIANA HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 357 



asked them a lot of things about tJieir busuiess. Then we sifted down 

 the information we secured. Now, there are dollars and cents in the point 

 I am making. We found there was consumed in the United States in 

 1890 more than $12,000,000 worth of cut flowers and aOout the same 

 amount of bedding plants. Nearly $25,000,000 was paid by the people of 

 the United States to adorn their homes, their persons and their grounds. 

 We found that all classes of people were buying flowers. You know, 

 there was a time when people never bought flowers except for a wedding, 

 a funeral or some other merry-making in the family. Now all classes of 

 people are buying flowers. In the factory villages and all other towns, 

 large and small, we find little florist establishments, and we were told 

 that the workers in the factory villages were often among the best cus- 

 tomers. Perhaps the workingman's wife would go to market with two 

 dollars, and instead of investing the whole sum in vegetables and meats, 

 twenty-five cents would be spent for flowers. That woman had learned 

 what the best horticulturists learned long ago, that you can nourish peo- 

 ple through their eyes. There is once in a while a man who will say: 

 "Oh, give me the grub; I don't care how you serve it up!" We found, as 

 the people became more and more cultured and refined in their tastes, 

 they became larger consumers of fruits and flowers. We found by study- 

 ing the statistics of education, and other moral statistics showing the 

 higher elevation of the people in different sections of the country, that 

 just as they went up in the scale of intelligence and i-efinement. so they 

 became greater consumers of flowers. Show me from the census a com- 

 munity where the people did not buy many flowers, and I will show you 

 a place where intelligence and refinement are at a low ebb. 



If people will buy beautiful flowers, how much more will they buy 

 beautiful fruit? As a business proposition, there is money in the culture 

 not only of good fruit, but of beautiful fruit, and the more beautiful we 

 can make our fruit the more people will buy; and if it is as good as it is 

 beautiful we will keep their pocketbooks open and will get more and 

 more money. 



The increase of wealth and population in this country is something 

 tremendous. There has also been a tremendous increase In the earning 

 power of our working people. Of course, we often hear people say that 

 a few are getting enormously rich and the masses are getting poorer. 

 That is not so. As a whole, this great country is growing in wealth. 

 Take, for example, my own city of Hartford, Conn. When I was a boy 

 I was interested in fruit culture, and there was only one dealer in fruits 

 in that city, and that was only forty years ago. I mean by this, of course, 

 a place where you could buy fruit in variety regularly. In Hartford 

 County at that time there were but two commercial small fruit growers, 

 and one had a quarter and the other a half acre for growing it. I heard 

 one of these men tell a neighbor one day. with a great deal of pride, that 

 he had sold six bushels of strawberries that day. Now, with just twice 



