54 An American Fruit-Farm 



tistics follow enthusiastically. The new gospel is 

 a bath and an overcoat as against a straight dose 

 of Calvinism, or heresy Literally it is now '*wash 

 and be clean.' 



The ideal farm-house of the pioneer was a 

 kitchen and a cellar and an outside chimney; of 

 the farm-house of to-day, a refrigerator, a bath- 

 room, a porch, and a vacuum cleaner. The world 

 is obsessed by Wesley's "Cleanliness is next to 

 godliness," and some disciples reverse the saying. 

 Ours is the age of soap and electricity, as was 

 Lucullus's of peacock tongues and proscriptions. 

 The age of pork and cabbage is past ; ours demands 

 the dessert. 



Yet, despite statistics, Hull House, psychology, 

 and desserts, we have more diseases to contend 

 against than had Naaman or Louis XIV. We 

 must take to spraying ourselves for insects and 

 fungi as we spray our orchards and vineyards. 

 Congestion of people and fruit trees has invited 

 disease. Fruit-raising is artificial, a sort of open- 

 air, hotbed work, — a case of floral over-population. 

 The fruit-farm is a concentration of effort to trim, 

 shape, and direct Nature to our liking. The 

 Japanese grow trees in human shape and admire 

 them as works of art and genius; the fruit-grower 

 grows a cherry whose fleshy part exceeds that of 

 a dozen cherries in the wild. All our fruits are 

 monstrosities obtained by the exaggeration, or 

 atrophy, of some part of the natural plant. We 

 force the plant to run to a juicy pulp, to leaf, or 



