80 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
Mr. Cline: Mr. Chairman, I make a 
motion to give each man six minutes. 
Motion seconded and lost 
Mr. Stewart: Mr. Rose says, accor¬ 
ding to this test, an orange may be fit 
to ship but not fit to eat. For that reason 
I am opposed to it. The old law says 
oranges that are immature and unfit to 
eat, shall not be shipped. 
Now, who talks about a standard for 
intoxicating liquors. We used to hear 
talk about cider not being an intoxicant 
on account of its small content of alcohol. 
In a case I had once I told the jury that 
when a man could take enough stuff into 
his stomach to make him drunk, it was 
an intoxicant. The case went to the up¬ 
per court and was affirmed. 
Any man who ships immature fruit 
unfit for consumption is guilty of a vio¬ 
lation of a law. You have justices of 
the peace before whom you can try these 
cases as they arise, in every precinct, and 
you can gO' before them and the witnesses 
can tell whether it is fit to eat or not. Any 
orange grower in this hous^ can tell 
when an orange is fit to eat. 
Now, all this about “acid test”; we 
haven’t got time to learn all that. If we 
had grown up with it in the schools we 
might know when an orange was 1.30 
per cent., but we don’t know about it now. 
Let our children learn it; the orange 
growers have no time for such tom-fool¬ 
ery. It seems ridiculous that we have 
to send clear to Tallahassee to have 
some chemist up there say that our fruit 
is fit to eat. If this is made a law, every 
man will have to be a chemist. I would 
not know any more about going to work 
by rule and proving that my fruit was 
fit to eat than I do about the Greek lan¬ 
guage, and if I were tried the gentlemen 
of the jury wouldn’t know anything 
about it any more than they did about 
the Greek language. According to this, 
every man will have to know something 
he does not know. In time we may 
know, if we take it up in the primary 
school. I suppose Mr. Rolfs and Mr. 
Rose can do it. 
If you take a hundred orange grow¬ 
ers and ask them to prove by the method 
described in this bill that an orange is fit 
to eat, I do not believe one can do it, 
but let them try it their own way, and 
every one of them can tell you when an 
orange is fit to eat. It takes an expert 
to tell you when the orange is fit to eat, 
and you know and I know that the big¬ 
gest fools in the world are what we get 
when we have to take expert testimony. 
The common, ordinary man who has 
his sense and ordinary knowledge, who 
has not been spoilt by too much informa¬ 
tion, like so many who look wise and say 
much and know little, can usually give 
more information than all your experts; 
at least, that has been my experience with 
expert testimony. 
I am an orange grower myself, and 
nothing else; I am not a broker; I am 
as free as the water that runs off the 
hill, and the interest of the orange grow¬ 
er is my heart’s delight, and I must state 
that I object to being hampered in the 
exercise of my rights as a shipper of 
fruit, and I believe everybody knows 
when his fruit is fit to eat. Let us have 
the law as it is passed; let us have it 
merely as it stands. Let us have the law 
so that your Justice of the Peace, before 
