CONFERENCE ON BULB-GROWING IN THE BRITISH ISLES. 297 
of organization and preparation for both peace and war in the past. 
We must also realize the necessity for education and public instruc- 
tion, wide, and of the right sort, because knowledge is the basis of 
all business. There must be an end in our Universities and Schools 
of the high and dry academic attitude towards Modernism, which 
begot the old University aphorism : " We know nothing of science 
here, we don't even teach it," and of such medieval systems of 
teaching as of the languages — especially the dead ; the sciences — 
especially the abstruse ; the Arts — especially such as can be said to 
be the most remote from common use. It is in these directions that 
this Dry Bulb Show and joint Conference of the Royal Horticultural 
Society and the Horticultural Trades Association are a modest first 
attempt to aid this branch of the horticultural trade and industry ; 
just as the Royal Horticultural Society has established a National 
Diploma in Horticulture, and has helped to found Science Degrees in 
Horticulture at the : University of London, and so to equip our horti 
cultural students, in place of the sword and spear of the gladiator, with 
the best and most modern weapons of intellectual precision, and to 
add to the rule-of-thumb the rule of trained teaching and experience. 
And it is to be hoped we shall, as a nation, remember our present 
lessons from the past, banish laissez-faire, and recall such warnings 
as those in the Report of the Royal Commission on Technical Educa- 
tion of even twenty or thirty years ago, telling us plainly of the dangers 
of the loss of our tar industries and our aniline dye trades to 
Germany, of our optical glass trades, lenses and glass bulbs, also 
largely lost to us, of our forgotten or neglected medical herbs and 
herb gardens (of which I have an old Georgian one at Chertsey), 
a hygienic subject on which the Royal Horticultural Society has also 
done its best by having had a large Conference here, over which I had 
the honour to preside ; all these " key " industries being the only 
open sesames " to success in our great textile and other trades, 
neglect of which has placed us in the most dangerous dependency on 
enemy nations. Such things must never be again — " Under which 
king, Bezonian ? Speak or die." Our very food supplies have thus 
been imperilled, and we begin to realize that the greatest public 
malefactor is the tyrant who boasted that where his charger's hoof 
had trod no blade ever grows again, and the greatest patriots and 
benefactors they who help to make two blades grow where only one 
has grown before. " Now " must be our new effort — now or never. 
Let me, then, encourage you and others to new efforts and methods by 
summarizing the situation of the nascent Dry Bulb Industry, as 
illustrated by to-day's Show, which I hope may be contributed to 
by this Conference of Experts. 
Amongst what may for convenience be called " bye " or " side " 
products of the war has been a distinct call to all patriotic Britons for 
the encouragement of Home Industries, and, as a help in this direction, 
the Council of the Royal Horticultural Society consented to hold this 
Exhibition of Home-grown Flower Bulbs, in order to demonstrate the 
