FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
149 
No talk was going to do any good. He had been fighting 
railroads for twenty years. Until we could keep together and 
go to the railroads with a firm demand, we could get nothing 
from them. Until we organized it was no use to keep talking. 
We must put our shoulders to the wheel. 
O. P. Rooks thought this was a subject in which we were 
very much interested, and as we had with us two gentle¬ 
men who had given a great deal of practical thought to 
the question, these problems having been before them and 
they having prepared a paper that they hoped to be able to 
present to the Society and, as some plan had been asked for, 
lie hoped to hear their paper read. 
C. F. A. Bielby disliked to antagonize Mr. Rooks, but was 
it right and proper for gentlemen who had some scheme or 
other on hand to come before the State Horticultural Society 
asking to lay before this Society that scheme? He thought 
this outside our province. If we allow one gentleman or two 
gentlemen to come in here and read us a paper which they 
have prepared on the organization of the state and upon the 
methods they think good, and make a Jubilee day come for 
him or them, we were bound to throw ourselves open to 
everything else and heretofore we had guarded this Society 
against being made a place lor the originators of transporta¬ 
tion ideas to come and orate upon their plans and spread 
them, through us, to the world. We were purely a scientific 
body and he believed the judgment of nine-tenths of all the 
old members of the Society to be against such a course. He 
protested against it. “When we admit the reading of such 
papers before the Society, the day of its dissolution begins. I 
believe it to be right and reasonable that we should calmly 
discuss every situation which makes progress towards our 
elevation and success. If any man has a plan fully perfected 
which has been published broadcast to the world and he 
comes here and properly discusses it, I do not object to it, 
but this is not the proper place to boom new ideas. I do not 
believe it is right tor us to appoint committees to go to At¬ 
lanta and meet committees on transportation matters. I do 
not believe we have any right to petition congress for a tariff 
to be put on or taken off anything. The purpose of our meet¬ 
ings is to interchange ideas that we have formed during the 
work of the year and everything that could be said for our 
mutual benefit and interest in the raising of fruit. If it is to 
be a question of one phase and the other phase of agitation, 
then I say that the Society will appear to the world as a 
political body and will be taking a step towards its dis¬ 
ruption. 
