1892.] TRANSACTIONS. 11 



hired help, essential to the securing of a harvest so thoroughly 

 sound ! But yet the Yankee, who is too busy, or too lazy, to 

 do the work in person, is not suffered to avail himself of the 

 best service. He sits cowardly by, nor so much as protests 

 against the importation of Hun or Slovack by a giant coal mo- 

 nopoly ; he walks meekly to the polls at the imperious summons 

 of some political boss, who supplements downright protection 

 by the indirect aid of unrestricted immigration from every 

 plague-spot of Asia ; and does not even whimper when Chinese 

 or Japanese, cleanly, industrious, trustworthy, whose history is 

 coeval with the earth's, and who are pastmasters in all floral and 

 pomological science, are yet forbidden, at the behest of the 

 great American blatherskite, whose mouth only works, to dig, 

 cull, assort, and pack for an insatiate market ! 



I have neither words nor patience to waste upon those, whose 

 creed is that the whole duty of man, in this American Republic 

 of ours, should be comprised in the study and practice of in- 

 tense selfishness. Live, and let live ! is a better, if not a 

 Christian motto. We should, in Horticulture, grow that which 

 we can to the best advantage ; selling any surplus in the most 

 profitable market. If the buyer is English, and proposes to 

 pay in tin or wool, the wisdom of making the trade will depend 

 very much upon the profit that we can figure. I prefer to pro- 

 duce fruits, knowing how ; he wants them to eat. But he is 

 short of cash and naturally desires to exchange that whereof he 

 is in most ample supply. Except history is a lie, all civiliza- 

 tion has been founded upon commerce. The hog roots ; and is 

 content with what is before his nose, unless he can possess the 

 whole trough ! But man is a nobler animal, it is to be hoped, 

 with tastes to be gratified and faculties to instruct. And so he 

 ransacks darkest continents, and the wastes of remotest seas, in 

 restless hunt for aught that may please the eye or tickle the 

 palate. The achievements of their merchants illumine the fair- 

 est pages that constitute the record of Greece, Italy, or Eng- 

 land. It was once the boast of Massachusetts that the sails of 

 her ships whitened every sea ; and that carrying out granite or 

 ice, they returned, freighted with 



" The wealth of Ormus, and of lud." 



