enormous expansion largely to the diversified variety of plants and 
flowers it is able to offer the buying public, it is obvious that any restric- 
tions on imports, especially on raw materials or plant products that can- 
not be commercially produced here, must be disastrous not only to hor- 
ticultural trade interests, but ultimately to the United States. 
To see why we need Government control of imports we must go back 
to the year 1912, just before the “Plant Quarantine Act” was passed by 
Congress; large shipments of plant products as well as nursery stock 
were ariving from foreign countries under no Federal control; some States 
had adequate inspection laws, properly enforced, other States had inade- 
quate laws and lax enforcement; some States had no inspection law; so 
the Department said that in view of that lack of uniformity in statute 
and enforcement and the occasional absence of any inspection, and con- 
sidering the common interest, the Department ought to be given author- 
ity to see that importations from districts harboring a pest new to 
this country or not generally distributed here, were given proper inspec- 
tion by Federal officers. 
What the Law Says a Quarantine Should Do 
That was the whole plea at that time; for inspection. The trade 
organizations recognized the necessity for such a law—the florists are 
_continually fighting insect pests and plant diseases, it is part of their 
business, and they wanted all the help the Department could give in com- 
bating the existing pests and, of course, keeping out others, so the law 
was passed by Congress and gave the Secretary, through the Board, wide 
powers. Then the quarantine orders began to come until we now have 
fifty-four of them. This law did not give the Board power to legislate, 
to prohibit imports because they happened to be horticultural imports, to 
build a Chinese wall around the United States in a horticultural sense 
with a few small openings; in fact it limited the issuance of quarantine 
orders in these four important ways: 
1. The quarantine must be to prevent the introduction into 
the United States of insect pests and plant diseases, 
2. Which are new to or not heretofore widely prevalent or 
distributed within or throughout the United States. 
3. The order can only prohibit importation from a country 
or locality where “such diseases or insect infestation exists,” and 
4. The country or locality, and the class of plant products to 
be excluded, must be specified in the order. 
If Belgium has, say, a dangerous disease which is new to or not 
widely prevalent here affecting Araucarias, this law gives power to 
exclude Araucarias from Belgium if that is the only way to exclude the 
disease; it clearly does not give the Department or the Board the power 
or right to exclude nearly all plant products from every country or lo- 
cality on the earth, on suspicion, as Qu. 37 does. 
We have outlined the original plan for inspection and certification 
as required by the Department and endorsed by the trade organizations: 
now let us come back to the present and see how far the Board has 
wandered from the original plan. I quote the words of the chairman 
of the Board, as printed in the florist trade papers: 
“As to returning to the old practically free entry of foreign 
plants, a test over a seven year period was given to the possi- 
bility of safeguarding such plant importations by inspection and 
disinfection, and this test indicated the absolute inadequacy and 
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