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New Jersey used to be called the Garden State. The seal of 

 New Jersey bears three plows and a horn of plenty beside the 

 Goddess of Liberty, and yet, long before my day, the plow was 

 sunk in the wheel of the machine; the horn of plenty is now 

 replaced by the cry that the cost of living is going up, though 

 right here behind this town, within three miles, are thousands of 

 acres of as fruitful lands as the earth ever saw. I can go out of 

 this room and find you a hundred thousand acres in South Jersey, 

 purchasable to-day at less than ten dollars an acre, and I can 

 prove to you that that land, when cleared at an expense of not 

 over twenty-five dollars an acre, and a lot of it is cleared by the 

 way, will be as productive as any of our western farm, land valued 

 now at upwards of a hundred dollars an acre. 



• I drew from the Federal census less than a month ago figures 

 which showed that whereas the farms of Iowa, recognized as 

 the banner farming State perhaps, are yielding about nine per 

 cent, gross income on the investment, land, buildings, stock and 

 the whole thing, the farms of New Jersey to-day, as far as they 

 are developed, are yielding eighteen per cent, gross income. 

 Only yesterday it became known to me that a man who' deserted 

 his profession to take up farming" in this State is pretty nearly 

 ready to quit the venture, not because the land has failed him, not 

 because the crops are not there, but because the mosquitoes are 

 troubling him. 



Thirty years ago when I lived and worked in Cumberland 

 County everything that we did during the summer season was 

 controlled in a large measure by these pests, I am as sure, gen- 

 tlemen, as; I can be, that the elimination of the mosquito will 

 produce — figures are of doubtful value — but literally millions in 

 ratables to these South Jersey counties. I am willing to venture 

 a prophesy that with mosquito elimination we can add to the 

 rural population of this section half a million people in ten years. 



And it is also true that many farmers of the Western States 

 are looking back East. Some of them are coming. We have 

 within a radius of sixty miles of the State House, a consuming 

 population of upwards of ten millions. That figure I will vouch 

 for — the densest, richest, civilized population on earth. It even 

 exceeds that of Belgium. 



