the most vital of our resources (soil) faster and in greater almost nothing has happened[1] save at the hands of a few private individuals who are working for the joy of creating.
Mr. Jardine, Secretary of Agriculture, told me very simply and directly why no step had been taken in his department. The department is busy with urgent matters, curing the troubles of crops that are already established. They have no money to expend on breeding crop trees for the future and for saving the soils by which future crops must live. We should not criticize Mr. Jardine or the Department. There are men there who yearn to do such work, but we must remember that the Department of Agriculture gets its money by way of the lord of the budget. Budget makers are not primarily men of creative instinct. They are money savers with an instinct to discourage and block new enterprises. If the man who made the budget should happen to be convinced of the efficacy of tree crops, something might be started; but the succeeding budget chief would probably have a mind quite impervious to trees, and the experiment would be blocked.
State experimental stations have, here and there, men who would like to do this kind of work; but the stations are dependent for the money they get on state legislatures, and it should not be forgotten that the first necessity of the legislator is to get elected, and his second concern is to get reëlected. In view of these two urgent and even pressing neceessities wequantity than has ever been done by any group of people at any time in the history of the world. If our people could be made to feel this, they would try to stop it.
A PLEASANT RECREATION
As outlined above this work can employ heavy endowments. On the other hand experiments with trees can be on almost any scale. Two trees, for example, might produce great (hybrid) results. There are thousands of individuals who can experiment and have pleasure,[2] recreation, and perhaps do something of great value to the human race.
Experimentation with nut trees is especially to be recommended for people in middle age and upward. One of the pains of advancing years is the declining circle of one's friends. One by one they leave the earth and the desolating loneliness of old age is felt by the survivors. But the man who loves trees finds that this group of friends (trees) stays with him, getting better, bigger, and more lovable as his years and their years increase. This perhaps explains the delightful enthusiasm of some of the septuagenarian and octogenarian tree lovers whom I know and have known, such as the late E. A. Richl and Benjamin Buckman, both of Illinois, who were plunging ahead in their eighties as though they were in their forties.
Mr. Richl began nut tree pioneering on some Mississippi bluffs near Alton at the age of sixty-three and actually made money out of nuts. He was really just getting started when he died at the age of eighty-seven. I knew him for eleven years. It was a great pleasure to associate with such a youthful and enthusiastic spirit. He was the youngest old man I ever knew,
- ↑ Ten years after this wide dissemination of the idea the United States Department of Agriculture was trying to get a private citizen of small means, one J. Russell Smith, to furnish the ground to test out a number of varieties of nut trees and also asked him to take care of the nut trees—Smith, a private citizen. Further than that they asked him if he wouldn't send them ten pounds of hickory nuts. This is no impeachment of the men in the Department of Agriculture, but it does prove that we cannot depend upon that system to get this big thing done. The Department has begged and begged for money, but our Congress instead builds warships and post offices and constructs a wondrous pork barrel. Votes do not grow on trees. Congressmen must get elected, and, yet worse for us, in some respects, they must get reëlected.
- ↑ I have altogether something like thirty-five varieties of walnuts, hickories, pecans, persimmons, papaws, and honey locust on test on my rocky hillside, and I find that I am having an amount of fun out of it that is as perfectly unreasonable and genuine as is the joy that remains for a month or two after making a good drive at golf.
