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people are this year undertaking this vast work on the Zuider 

 Zee, you will be surprised to learn that very many of our people 

 here refuse to profit by and adopt the methods developed by this 

 very long experience abroad. The opinion of what I fear is a 

 majority of our Jerseymen, appears to be that it is beneath them 

 to adopt anything from European experience. Such an attitude 

 is startling, and yet it has been met with by me on more than one 

 occasion. Such complacent self-sufficiency does not augur well 

 for the future progress of our State. On one occasion I was 

 asked indignantly by an educated man of this State if I could 

 not find an example of shore protection 'nearer at hand than in 

 Belgium. What mattered it to him that those engineers had 

 successfully solved the problem and had had 700 years' experi- 

 ence, certainly sufficient to entitle them tO' be regarded as in 

 some measure experts in that particular line of work. America 

 has gone far because of her remarkable natural resources, but 

 it is worth while for every American to stop and consider hov/ 

 far we would have gotten with our methods had we worked 

 under the conditions which have confronted the Dutchmen; 

 or, to put it another way, how far would the Dutchman have 

 gone if we had opened to him the opportunities offered by 

 America. I suggest this line of thought from patriotic motives, 

 because the man or nation that can no longer learn from others 

 is in danger. Sooner or later he will be left behind in the race. 



It is worthy of our notice that, as I have already stated, the 

 Royal Zuider Zee Commission finds a prospective revenue from 

 the reclaimed lands which is equivalent to $140 per acre by our 

 standards. If this is applied to the 300,0001 acres of marsh lands 

 in New Jersey, it represents an annual income of $42,000,000, 

 or nearly three times the cost of reclamation. As I said before, 

 we have not the efficient Dutch farmers, but we have quite as 

 good, or better, markets, and with the increasing cost of food 

 we shall unquestionably rapidly develop more efficient farming 

 methods. Consequently, it does not seem unreasonable to look 

 forward to an annual revenue at least greater than the whole 

 cost of reclaiming our marsh land. 



