can see that it is a rare accident when money is to be had for the prolonged task of developing tree crops. Neither by theory nor by practice are we justified in expecting democratic legislation to look far forward[1] in its appropriations save for education and military defense.
For America tree crops are a new thing, a new idea. No elected legislature can possibly be expected to appropriate regularly for such creative work. Was there a state appropriation or congressional appropriation back of Morse when he created the telegraph, or Edison working wonders with electricity, or Langley working out the theory of flying, or of Orville Wright, the first to make successful flight, or of Lindbergh when he flew from continental mainland to continental mainland? No! These things were done with private money urged by an idea. By this means also must come most of the creative work in making a tree-crop agriculture. Some person of prophetic vision is needed to finance an institute of mountain agriculture. There, protected from the variations due to change of officials, new things could be developed to the point where state experiment stations and governmental bureaus could take them up, test them, and pass them along.
THE KINDS OF WORK TO BE DONE
Such an institute would have a variety of work to do:
- 1. Finding parent trees from which to start crops.
- 2. Hybridizing to produce better parent trees.
- 3. Maintaining testing grounds to try out the new trees as
- ↑ As an evidence of the low intellectual and civic level of legislation in America, I will not refer to the psychology and facts of municipal elections in Chicago, for example. Instead I cite the widespread American practice of taxing young forest. Tax the forest and you put a premium on neglect and on cutting the forest. This continues despite a well-known fact of coming lumber scarcity and much preaching. If legislation should tax the lumber and exempt the forest there would be a premium on its preservation. Most American state legislatures cannot be made to see so simple a proposition as this. No, it is foolishness to expect state legislatures to do the big thing in tree-crops creation.
