TWENTY-EIGHTH FRUIT- GROWEES' CONVENTION. 



73 



future that this grower wants. Perhaps you think his wants are too great 

 for the United States Treasury to satisfy. By no means ! There is one 

 simple method of furnishing the postoffice with ample funds and equip- 

 ping national steel roads. This grower wants to see the millions, now 

 worse than wasted on an army for destructive purposes, utilized to uni- 

 versal advantage on an army for constructive purposes. He wants to 

 see America a world-power in the old sense of an enlightenment and 

 example to other nations, and not a world-power in the European sense 

 of a bullying exploiter and destroyer of weaker peoples, under the 

 intolerant plea that their civilization is not our civilization. The worst 

 possible infringement of the Monroe doctrine is the introduction into 

 this hemisphere of European militarism, with its overbearing aristo- 

 cratic tendencies, and its endless exactions on the scantily furnished 

 purse of the toiler. 



This grower deplores the day when peurile jingoism discovered George 

 Washington and the signers of the Declaration of Independence to be 

 " back numbers." He wants Washington's warning words of parting 

 to ring in the ears of every American, young and old; the words, viz.: 

 that a " standing army is dangerous to the liberties of any nation and 

 it is especially inimical to republican liberties." 



"Were half the power that holds the world in terror, 



Were half the w T ealth bestowed on camps and courts, 

 Given to redeem the human mind from error, 

 There were no need of arsenals or forts." 



This brings me to the last desire I have time now to express — a desire 

 for a better education for all of us, old and young. I am a little dis- 

 posed to think that what Mr. Collis P. Huntington once said of our 

 educational S}^stem is true: "It teaches boys to talk instead of teaching 

 them to work." We have to learn to realize with the leader of the 

 Roycrofters, that "He is best educated who is most useful"; and w 7 ith 

 President Jordan that u Wisdom is the knowledge of what is best to do 

 next; skill is showing how to do, and virtue is doing it." 



In the past, we have let pedants and pedagogues tell us what was a 

 true education. They, with their little stock-in-trade of Latin or Greek 

 and the like, told us that the stuff they had to peddle was the genuine 

 goods. So in my young days a man was not called "educated" unless 

 he could lard his eloquence with extracts of ancient Greece or offer his 

 hearers a fragment of Latin tongue. Now we laugh at such foolishness, 

 and deem it conceited pedantry. But we still suffer our boys and girls 

 to be dosed with the same mixture, under the pretext that it is necessary 

 to a knowledge of our own language; when at the same time we know, 

 on the word of his friend Ben Jonson, that the greatest master of 

 English literature the world has ever known, William Shakespeare, had 

 "small Latin and less Greek." 



