Proceedings of Eighth Annual Meeting 53 



certainly would have gone into a hole, as the groundhog has done, 

 for another sleep. But we know the child can be sure to make a man 

 of himself, and this mosquito work is going on about the same way, 

 we are being educated from day to day, and the first thing we know 

 there will be a complete apparatus generated from it that will clean 

 up our state and make it just exactly what we want it to be. 



You must bear in mind that the very effect of the education is 

 against us. The more you educate the people to these things the 

 harder your problem becomes, because they know all you know. If 

 they are bitten by a mosquito after this educational proposition has 

 gone forward they say, ''Why, here, you fellows were going to kill 

 all these mosquitoes." Now that requires a little explanation, but 

 we are getting so we do not have to explain. We just simply wait 

 until the idea develops in their minds and the first thing we know 

 they are with us and after a while they understand the proposition. 



Our problem in Ocean County, as I said before, is the annihila- 

 tion of our salt marsh menace and that is what we have confined 

 ourselves to. Our board of freeholders has been just as generous, 

 I think, as they ought to have been. We have had an appropriation 

 for several years of $10,000. This year we asked them for an 

 appropriation of $12,000. We went before them and simply 

 explained the problem, that our problem was so and so, and the 

 sooner we got the money the quicker we could get through with it, 

 and we would like to have had $5,000 additional. But they thought 

 it over in their wisdom, considering the taxation in Ocean County, 

 and they said $12,000 was all they could give us. 



We have taken the money and put it in and tried to get the most 

 number of feet of ditches that we could build in order to cover this 

 additional drainage. We have had during this time to go back over 

 and perfect a great deal of the drainage that was done before. 

 What we are doing we are doing worth while and covering our 

 problems as they present themselves. 



We have got in Ocean County something like five hundred and 

 seventy miles of ditches. That is quite a number of feet of ditches. 

 When you take it into the millions it is sometimes easier to conceive 

 of than when you speak of it in miles. 



We are rather fortunate in the labor market down there. We 

 have a good many men living in the central part of Ocean County 

 who are meadow men, who are either used to haying or ditching or 

 working around the salt marsh and are content to do that. We can 

 so move those men back and forth to their daily tasks and their 



