THE PRESIDENT: I want to take the liberty of using thirty seconds in this period of exhortation and confession to come in on the same strain. After all, what is life for? How many of us want the thing that is dead easy, and how many of us want the job with nothing to do? We all, in a certain lazy mood, say we want something easy and want to rest, but if there is anything on earth that a man shuns above all else it is that little room with absolutely nothing to do, namely, a cell. When they want to break a man they don't put him at hard labor on the stone pile; they put him in a little room with nothing to do. The youngster who plays doesn't want a dead easy game. He builds a house, and, when he has done with it, bang, he doesn't want the house he wanted to build. And I must confess that if it were perfectly plain sailing and you could plant out all these nut trees and have them grow like fury, it would not be much fun. It is a fact that men like to achieve and experiment; men like effort. Suppose everybody in this country retired and could put up his feet and do nothing, there wouldn't be a name in the paper the next morning. Mr. Hughes, President Wilson, Mr. Taft, Mr. Brandies, and all of the great men who are doing things in this world would all be gone fanning themselves quietly. This world is run by men who don't have to work; they work for fun. So I wish to submit that the tree--if a man happens to be built to love plants that grow--that the tree is one of the great avenues of fun.
MR. WEBER: Mr. President, along the same line of thought, I wish to express my views with what Colonel Van Duzee has had to say. If we were to attend a convention of surgeons and hear different diseases and ailments of the body discussed, we would probably all be disposed to think that we were standing on the tip-end of the diving board into eternity beyond. But people keep on living just the same, notwithstanding the knocking of the doctors, and the diseases to which we are subject, and trees will keep on growing just the same, notwithstanding their diseases and various other troubles, and so I think no one should be discouraged.
THE SECRETARY: I just want to add my little encouragement. In spite of all the failure that I have had, and they have been many, in spite of the reports of failures of others and the pessimism of others, I have the same abiding faith in the future of nut growing, and just the same enthusiasm for it that I had in the beginning, if not greater. (Applause.)