124 N. J. Mosquito Extermination Association 



me very much of an earnest conversation I had with General Goethals 

 two or three years ago. He was then employed by the state to lay 

 out its roads. I told him of a little dream that I had. I explained 

 that all this 296,000 acres of waste land in New Jersey, according 

 to Dr. Lipman's statement, is simply filled with natural plant-food, 

 and that with drying out by means of dikes and tide-gates, it can 

 be made into fertile agricultural land, worth at least a hundred dol- 

 lars an acre. The cost of this reclamation would be only $40 or 

 $50 an acre, and perhaps less. "Now," I said, "it seems to me there 

 are three facts that we have in hand. One is your building roads 

 north and south, and if we are going to have farms in these sec- 

 tions, there will be another reason for the roads. This same land 

 that we propose to make into farm lands is today the prey of a pest 

 which invades more than half of the territory of South Jersey." 

 So I went on talking on the mosquito phase of it, the farming phase, 

 the road phase and the military phase. 



Of course. General Goethals knows a great deal about mosquito 

 extermination, because he saw plenty of it at Panama. So I said, 

 "It seems that if I could get you interested with us we would go to 

 the Legislature and get $10,000,000, and with this sum would just 

 clean up the whole business and have a law passed providing that 

 while we would go and improve the man's farm-land we would just 

 place upon it a lien according to the cost of improvement, and 

 whenever the man sold it he would have to pay that lien. At any 

 rate, there must be a wholesale operation and we have got to get 

 at it in your big way. What a fine thing it would be to clean up 

 South Jersey and produce these farms. The farm today is being 

 invaded by the city. The number of people that have to be fed is 

 increasing and the amount of land for raising it is decreasing, and 

 this seems to me to be a serious situation." His reply was, "I am 

 very much interested. I want to assure you that I shall be glad to 

 back anything of that kind, for it sounds very attractive to me." 



This same story got into the hands of Austin Colgate and he 

 thought very highly of it too. 



There is this one more thought : people will not think any more 

 of us than we think of ourselves. If this association holds the good 

 opinion of its own ability to join in an enterprise to help this move- 

 ment through at this juncture, we are more likely to have the good 

 faith and the good opinion of outsiders ; and that, of course, is very 

 important. 



