PROCEEDINGS OF THIRTY-SIXTH FRUIT-GROWERS ' CONVENTION. 13 



the safeguarding of our trees from the further invasion of insect pests 

 and plant diseases, by the thorough enforcement of the horticultural 

 laws; freight rates upon fruits and prompt, efficient transportation: 

 the improvement of our State markets and the search for every possible 

 consumer in our eastern markets, through the most effective methods 

 of cooperation and distribution that can be devised, and not the least 

 of the questions that should be discussed is a general propaganda 

 against the promotion of land schemes all over the State by syndicated 

 orchards and vineyards planted for the sole purpose of selling the land. 

 Our convention might also profitably consider tariffs, taxation of tree 

 and vine, National quarantine against pests, noxious weeds, fruit sul- 

 phuring, standardization of all kinds of fruits and the proper and 

 effective branding thereof. In fact, the range of subjects that is now 

 engaging the field of horticulture is so great that we can not go amiss 

 for something worthy of debate and determination at these sessions, 

 and I earnestly hope our committee on resolutions will draw up a clear 

 and forceful declaration upon every issue which its members deem 

 important, and that the convention will pass upon the result after due 

 discussion and voice its sentiments with courage and precision. 



FARM LABOR. 



These topics remind us in looking them over how easy it is to suggest 

 subjects, and how difficult it is to bring them to a conclusion. The farm- 

 labor problem, for example, is one of the most exasperating, and yet I 

 have been asked to discuss it here. It is with great reluctance that 

 I undertake to do so, for it is a tangle of social, political, industrial and 

 racial elements. It is like the rainbow colors revolving upon a disk. 

 You ran make the color white, or any shade into black, or every color 

 its own. by the way you turn the circular plate. I am not sure that this 

 comparison is good, for there are many growers here who have been 

 trying for years to make the labor question show white, and are con- 

 vinced that it will require a different revolution from any that has been 

 tried to make it show up in anything but somber hue. But to me the 

 Lights and shadows of this issue are sufficiently bewildering even if we 

 could bring it down to the economics of the farm alone. And when the 

 farm-help question is carried into sand-lot discussion, into argument 

 sociological, ethnological, and everything but simply logical, a Phila- 

 delphia lawyer could not untangle the skein. But we will leave the 

 agitators to explain how they can reconcile the dominance of the Pacific 

 by America, with the policy of excluding the Asiatic from all reciprocal 

 advantage, and look for a moment to the domestic features of the hired- 

 help, problem. 



With the exception of pruning and one or two other items of orchard 

 practice the scarcity of farm labor is felt altogether at harvest time. 

 Fruit growing has not been a growth in California altogether if we con- 

 sider the building up of correlative enterprises along with it in the rural 

 districts, such as manufacturing, mercantile, and other subsidiaries. 

 On the contrary, fruit production has become, in many lines, an accre- 

 tion of large enterprises but little dependent upon each other in hus- 

 bandry and dependent upon labor in large quantities but a portion of 

 the time. If horticulture had been a steady, slow development, as was 

 agriculture east of the Mississippi we would have been far behind our 



