III. THE NEED OF NATIONAL AID FOR EXTENSION WORK-Continued.

7. National aid would give unity of organization and method to this work. The present work is both desultory and chaotic. It is not desirable to have it exactly alike in all States. It is de sirable to have it comprehensive and unified and to give it general direction, as could be done through the Federal Department of Agriculture.

IV. THE ADVANTAGES OF THE PRESENT BILL.

Outline of the bill.-The bill provides that each State shall be granted $10,000 a year by the Federal Government, for the purpose of carrying on extension work in agriculture, domestic science, and other phases of rural life. This would mean about $500,000 a year.

After two years, any State which has accepted this grant and organized a department of extension teaching at its agricultural college, may have from the Federal Treasury an amount of money, in addition to the $10,000, equal to the amount which it appropriates from the state treasury, the maximum limit of the amount to be granted to each State from the Federal Treasury, in addition to the $10,000, being 1 cent per capita for the population of the State.

Thus the total appropriations from the National Treasury would aggregate about $500,000 for the initial appropriations, and about $1,000,000 more on the basis of 100,000,000 people in our country, or about a million and a half a year all told when the law was in complete operation in every State, which would probably not be for some years.

1. This bill, if it became a law, would stir at once a nation-wide campaign for popular agricultural education.

2. It gives the people of the small, poor, or backward State an even chance to get started with the people of the more progressive and wealthy States.

3. It gives a certain measure of national direction, through the Department of Agriculture, but leaves the details to States. Thus it divides responsibility between the States and the nation.

4. It leaves to the individual States the future development of the work.

5. It gives adequate strength and breadth to the whole scheme of extension teaching, and puts it on a good, firm basis of practice. 6. It includes woman's work on the farm, a field hitherto almost untilled by our agricultural educational enterprises.

7. It puts the work into the hands of the best men our country can afford, namely, the workers in our agricultural colleges and experiment stations.

8. It developes in each State immediately a central plant, or office, to which all organizations or individuals interested in agriculture can look for help, and with which they can cooperate. It brings the work of research and college teaching close to the people.

9. It relieves experiment stations of an immense amount of work which they are now performing in disseminating agricultural information, but which does not really belong to them, and thus gives their men time for more thorough research and experimental work.

10. It completes the circle of national aid to agricultural colleges through the Morrill acts, the Hatch and Adams acts, and the Nelson act. It rounds out therefore a system of national aid for agricultural institutions of higher grade, and the work of these institutions is not complete until this task of disseminating information into every corner of the lard is complete.

V.-MISCELLANEOUS CONSIDERATIONS.

1. This appropriation should be regarded not merely as a subsidy to agriculture, but as a statesmanlike act, of aid to consumers and producers alike, for it will accomplish more than any other one measure in developing adequately our fundamental industry of growing food for the increasing population.

2. This appropriation should be regarded not primarily as an appropriation which expends money without return, but distinctly as the investment of a nation in its most important single industry. 3. It is estimated that the annual value of our agricultural products is $8,000,000,000. Can not the Government wisely invest $1,500,000 a year for the purpose of teaching the 12,000,000 farmers and farm workers how to do their work better?

VI.-HAS THIS BILL POPULAR SUPPORT?

1. It is to be noted that other colleges not agricultural are rapidly
taking up this very line of extension work among the people
of the cities. This indicates their faith in the value of this
type of work. In fact, it is now becoming a recognized obliga-
tion upon every well-equipped college and university to reach
out to the people who can not become resident students.

2. The farmers believe absolutely in such extension work as has
already been done, and indeed their chief reason for their
present faith in our agricultural colleges and experiment sta-
tions is the fact that these colleges and experiment stations
have attempted to help directly the farmers on the land. The
farmers are willing to help support the present work, and they
will welcome more of it; indeed, they constantly call for it.
3. The National Grange, and numerous state granges, have definitely
pledged their support to this particular bill.

4. The same is true of the National Farmers' Congress.

5. The Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, representing every agricultural college and experiment station in the United States, has definitely placed itself on record in favor of this particular bill.

6. The Commission on Country Life, after many hearings in all parts of the country and after securing the returns from tens of thousands of people all over the land, made the development of a national system of extension work one of its three fundamental suggestions for movements to get under way at once. It also said:

"The subject of paramount importance in our correspondence and in the hearings is education.

串 *

"We find a general demand for federal encouragement in educational propaganda, to be in some way cooperative with the States. The people realize that the incubus of ignorance and inertia is so heavy and so widespread as to constitute a national danger, and that it should be removed as rapidly as possible. It will be increasingly necessary for the national and state governments to cooperate to bring about the results that are needed in agricultural and other industrial education.

"Beyond and behind all educational work there must be an aroused intelligent public sentiment; to make this sentiment is the most important work immediately before us. The whole country is alive with educational activity. While this activity may all be good, it nevertheless needs to be directed and correlated, and all the agencies should be more or less federated. The arousing of the people must be accomplished in terms of their daily lives or of their welfare. For the country people this means that it must be largely in terms of agriculture. Some of the colleges of agriculture are now doing this kind of work effectively, although on a pitiably small scale as compared with the needs. This is extension work, by which is meant all kinds of educational effort directly with the people, both old and

VI. HAS THIS BILL POPULAR SUPPORT?-Continued.

young, at their homes and on their farms; it comprises all educational work that is conducted away from the institution and for those who can not go to schools and colleges.

"To accomplish these ends, we suggest the establishment of a nation-wide extension work. The first or original work of the agricultural branches of the land-grant colleges was academic in the old sense; later there was added the great field of experiment and research; there now should be added the third coordinate branch, comprising extension work, without which no college of agriculture can adequately serve its State. It is to the extension departments of these colleges, if properly conducted, that we must now look for the most effective rousing of the people on the land."

The above memorandum is submitted on behalf of the committee on extension work of the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, comprising the following gentlemen: Charles R. Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin; Charles F. Curtiss, dean of the division of agriculture and director of the experiment station of Iowa State College; W. C. Latta, superintendent of Indiana Farmers' Institutes; Andrew M. Soule, president of Georgia Agricultural College; E. A. Burnett, dean of the School of Agriculture and director of the experiment station of the University of Nebraska; Kenyon L. Butterfield, president of Massachusetts Agricultural College, chairman.

TO ESTABLISH STANDARD PACKAGES AND GRADES FOR

APPLES.

COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE,
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

Wednesday, March 9, 1910.

The committee met at 10.30 o'clock a. m., Hon. Charles F. Scott (chairman) presiding.

The committee had under consideration the following bill:

[H. R. 16919, Sixty-first Congress, second session.]

A BILL To establish standard packages and grades for apples, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That for the purposes of interstate and foreign commerce and commerce within the District of Columbia or the Territories of the United States, the term "closed package for apples" shall apply to any barrel, box, or basket in which the apples can not readily be seen or inspected.

SEC. 2. That the standard closed packages for apples which shall be shipped or delivered for shipment in interstate or foreign commerce or sold or offered for sale within the District of Columbia or the Territories of the United States are as follows: First. The standard box package for apples is a box having a capacity of not less than two thousand three hundred and forty-two cubic inches when measured without distention of its parts.

Second. The standard basket package for apples is a basket having a capacity of not less than two thousand three hundred and forty-two cubic inches, when measured level full, without distention of its parts.

Third. The standard barrel package for apples is a barrel of the following dimensions when measured without distention of its parts: Length of stave, twenty-eight and one-half inches; diameter of head, seventeen and one-eighth inches; distance between heads, twenty-six inches; circumference of bulge, sixty-four inches outside measurement.

SEC. 3. That the standard grades for apples which shall be shipped or delivered for shipment in interstate or foreign commerce or which shall be sold or offered for sale within the District of Columbia or the Territories of the United States are as follows: Apples of one variety, which are well-grown specimens, hand picked, of good color for the variety, normal shape, practically free from insect and fungus injury, bruises, and other defects, except such as are necessarily caused in the operation of packing, or apples of one variety which are not more than ten per centum below the foregoing specifications, are standard grade "U. S. Size A," if the minimum size of the apples is two and one-half inches in transverse diameter; or are standard grade "U. S. Size B," if the minimum size of the apples is two and one-fourth inches in transverse diameter; or are standard grade “U. S. Size C," if the minimum size of the apples is two inches in transverse diameter.

SEC. 4. That apples in closed packages shall be deemed to be misbranded within the meaning of the act approved June thirtieth, nineteen hundred and six, entitled "An act for preventing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors, and for regulating traffic therein, and for other purposes" (Thirty-four Statutes, page seven hundred and sixty-eight), in the following cases:

First. If the package bears any statement, design, or device indicating that the package is a standard closed package for apples, as herein defined, and the capacity of the package is less than the capacity prescribed by section two of this act for standard closed box packages or standard closed basket packages or standard closed barrel packages for apples, as the case may be.

Second. If the capacity of the package is less than the capacity prescribed by section two of this act for standard closed box packages or standard closed basket packages or standard closed barrel packages for apples, unless the package shall be plainly marked on end and side, in the case of boxes, with the words "short box," or with the number of cubic inches the box actually contains; or, in the case of baskets, with the words "short basket," or with words or figures showing the fractional relation which the actual capacity of the basket bears to the capacity prescribed by section two of this act for standard closed basket packages for apples; or, in the case of barrels, with the words "short barrel," or with words or figures showing the fractional relation which the actual capacity of the barrel bears to the capacity prescribed by section two of this act for standard closed barrel packages for apples. The marking required by this paragraph shall be in block letters of size not less than seventy-two point block gothic.

Third. If the package bears any statement, design, or device indicating that the apples contained therein are standard grade "U. S. Size A," "U. S. Size B," or "U. S. Size C," as the case may be, and the apples do not conform to the requirements prescribed by section three of this act for apples of the particular grade.

Fourth. If the package bears any statement, design, or device indicating that the apples contained therein are standard grade "U. S. Size A,” “U. S. Size B," or "U. S. Size C,' as the case may be, and the package fails to bear also a statement of the name of the variety, the name of the locality where grown, and the name of the packer or the person by whose authority the apples were packed and the package marked.

SEC. 5. That this act shall be in force and effect from and after the first day of July, nineteen hundred and ten.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee has met this morning at the request of Representative Lafean, the author of the measure we have before us for consideration, the bill (H. R. 16919) "To establish standard packages and grades for apples, and for other purposes.' A number of gentlemen are here desiring to be heard on the measure, and the committee will be glad to listen to what they have to say. Before commencing the oral hearing, however, I desire to call the attention of the committee to the fact that I am in receipt of a large number of communications in relation to the bill; telegrams and letters and resolutions from different organizations from various parts of the country. I take it that, following our usual custom, these communications will simply be placed on file in connection with other data relating to the bill, but will not be made a part of the hearings, inasmuch as they necessarily repeat the same arguments, to a very great extent, and would not particularly enlighten the committee. Mr. Lafean, as the author of this bill I presume you desire to make a statement in regard to it, and the committee would be very glad to hear you, and would ask you then to introduce other gentlemen whom you wish to have heard.

STATEMENT OF HON. DANIEL F. LAFEAN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA.

Mr. LAFEAN. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, I am the author of the bill H. R. 16919, and we have quite a number of gentlemen here representing the apple shippers' associations, horticultural associations, and fruit growers' associations of all sections of the United States. The bill in itself seems to me a meritorious one, and two points recently have come to my attention that forcibly impress upon my mind the importance of a standardization of the package and the grades.