130 ANNUAL REPORT. 



raace and want are seen and felt no more, and to that end I will 

 add a few thoughts on the subject of blight — the cause and the 

 remedy. 



That blight is a malady that floats in the atmosphere is a well- 

 defined fact in its freaks with us, and runs in atmospheric currents, 

 sometimes only a few feet in width, and at other times in a great 

 wave as it were miles in width, bat like a tornado, the greatest ruin 

 at its center. For years we have noted its freaks, and perhaps no 

 one fruit grower has had more of it on his grounds than we, more 

 or less, each season for the last 12 years; but the greatest ruin done 

 was in the month of June, 1881, when over a thousand bearing 

 trees were killed dead, and twice as many more badly damaged, 

 their death being only a matter of time, for when the blight strikes 

 on the body of a tree it is death sooner or later. Certain it is a great 

 calamity close akin to the cholera, of which it is a pathfinder now 

 on its third tour around the world, twice followed by the cholera 

 and the cholera again on its track, with a power to expand that no 

 ■quarantine can long hold in check. Cholera once in motion, like 

 tree blight, is bound to travel wherever it can find congenial food 

 to feed upon, which is debauchery, poverty, and filth; for it was 

 those ingredients that set it in motioUj and in quest of that food 

 it travels; but when in motion the more pure and cleanly often 

 fall a prey to it just as they should, as a punishment of the 

 world at large for allowing the oppression that set the calamity 

 in motion. That it was British oppression in India that set 

 cholera in motion, I presume there is no question Then such a 

 high tariff was put on salt that the poor could not buy it, not 

 even allowed to use sea water, and the result a raging dysentery, 

 which at last took the form of cholera, and swept over the world in 

 the trail of the blight. The barometer shows storms to have an 

 atmospheric path-finder, a current that goes before and opens the 

 way, or in other words lays the track for the storm to travel on. 

 And that cholera floats in the atmosphere no one questions; and 

 is in reality an epidemic storm, though not upturning trees and 

 houses like a tornado of wind, yet its destruction of human 

 life is none the less fearful, and came out of Asia preceded by tree 

 blight and the epizootic — the pathfinders — the warnings of worse 

 to follow, and to guard against the one is to guard against the 

 other — remove the cause that set them in motion. No remedy, 

 nor quarantine yet tried can ward off or stay their ownward 

 march nor ever can so long as there is congenial food ahead to 

 tempt onward. To stop the onward march of these maladies, is 



