122 PROCEEDINGS OF THIRTY-THIRD FRUIT-GROWERS , CONVENTION. 



history of the world. It occurs to me that if I review the suggestions 

 which the papers this afternoon have presented to us my subject would 

 be almost as broad as that of old Jim. One thing that I do want to 

 say, and that may be of some value in crystallizing an idea that has 

 already been advanced by Mr. Mills, is that we would gain a great deal 

 more in these meetings if we had fewer papers and discussed fewer sub- 

 jects and threshed out those subjects more completely until we ex- 

 hausted their possibilities. There were a great many things said to-day 

 that were very valuable. There have been a great many ideas advanced 

 which go to the moral order and safety of society, and I think we would 

 have had much more benefit if we had discussed those things at length. 



I was reminded, as I heard the different speakers read their papers, 

 of what different views we took of life and of what different concep- 

 tions we had of our various duties to society. Take, for example, our 

 friend Mr. Judd, who read to us such a vigorous and thoughtful paper 

 a short time ago. We gained the idea from that paper that if our tax 

 system were equalized, if our system of raising revenue were placed 

 on a just and safe basis, most of the ills which afflict us would be eradi- 

 cated. It would have been a very fruitful subject for discussion if we 

 had followed out that thing and sifted some of the chaff from the wheat 

 which that article contained. 



It may not be unprofitable for me to give my views on two or three 

 things which have been brought before us, and though they are hasty 

 and crude, yet they are in, the nature of discussion. I do not thoroughly 

 agree with Mr. Judd, for example, that the manner of unequal taxation 

 upon the farmer has been responsible for all the consequences which he 

 so seriously and thoroughly outlined. I think that one of the things 

 which has cursed the growth of America has been the idea of haste. We 

 wanted to do it all in a day, and I think that the inequalities in our 

 taxation and the prostration of some of our agricultural interests and 

 the abandonment of some of our agricultural territory have been due 

 to that more than to the causes somewhat emphasized in that paper. We 

 have been building civilizations based upon cities ; we have been trying 

 to build up commerce ; we have been trying to get the balance of trade on 

 the right side. We have been doing things for to-day instead of for the 

 future. We have entered into a new country and built it up ; we have 

 built ''Lusitanias" which will bring any quantity of people every two 

 or three days and land them here. We have been living off the richness 

 and the fatness of the land and have been skimming it off, and so we 

 have gone out and we have plowed with steam plows and we have har- 

 vested with combined harvesters and we have slashed forests and 

 burned millions of feet of lumber where it was in our way. That is 

 one of the reasons why the cities have grown disproportionately large. 

 We have not done anything to build up our agricultural industry; we 



