198 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



spring I went to a real estate agent for a man in Wisconsin who 

 wanted a piece of land to grow fruit upon. He did not want to sell 

 any land for fear he would beat the man out of his money. When a 

 real estate man has that kind of a feeling he must certainly have an 

 idea that fruit cannot be raised. It gives you some idea of the in- 

 terest that exists among those people in pushing horticultural 

 progress. The greater part of your work consists in stimulating 

 more or less confidence in those newer regions that lie outside of the 

 direct influence of your society, and I am glad your society exists 

 to that grand end, and I want to thank you for the encouragement 

 I receive every day from the work you are doing in stimulating con- 

 fidence in northwestern horticulture. (Applause.) 



Mrs. L. A. Alderman (S. D.) : Mr. President, I feel indebted 

 to the Minnesota Horticultural Society for even the little I know 

 in the line of horticulture, but I feel a good deal about my horti- 

 culture like the old resident of California who was asked to prophesy 

 what kind of a winter they were going to have. "I don't know," 

 he replied, 'T have been here too long; ask some tenderfoot." I 

 have the feeling that I don't know as much about horticulture as I 

 did ten years ago, the cause of blight, etc., things I feel quite lost 

 about ; yet we have had some good measure of success in raising 

 apples and small fruits in South Dakota, and I came all the way from 

 there to sit at the feet of these Gamaliels and learn what I could. I 

 feel amply repaid. I thank you. (Applause.) 



The President : Sometimes we are a great deal like those boys 

 when they arrive at the age of sixteen to eighteen when they know 

 more than their fathers. I have often advised them to write a book 

 and have it printed and preserved, because they will never know so 

 much again. (Laughter.) We all remember those early days that 

 have been so feelingly alluded to by my friends, Harris and Reed, 

 when everything looked dark and gloomy, and we were all at sea, 

 no light anywhere to guide us, no mark to guide our pathway, not 

 even so much as the mariner had who went out to sea fifteen or twen- 

 ty miles on a dark night and dropped a shingle every half mile, think- 

 ing on the way back he would pick them up and thus find his way to 

 shore. We had no such guide as that, not even a shingle to guide us. 

 But now we have got onto terra firma, we feel that our feet are on 

 solid ground, we are feeling like Archimides wanted to be. He said : 

 "You give me ground solid enough to stand on and a lever long 

 enough, and I will move the world." We have got the solid ground 

 and the question is whether our lever is quite long enough or not ; 

 but it is growing, and everything in the horticultural line is begin- 

 ning to move, and it has been moving rapidly the last two or three 

 years, and its course is still upward and onward. What the end 

 will be not even the most sanguine can prophesy. 



