et out and fight for your proposition and you will put it over!"

Last year I went up into New York State with a prominent public man, who
was to make a speech. This man was delayed, and in order to get there he
had to jump on the last platform of the last car. He had eaten no lunch,
and only a light breakfast. He said he should surely fail in his speech
because he was faint from lack of food. I asked him what he would eat if
he had the chance. He said soup, half a chicken, potatoes and asparagus,
and apple pie. I told the train boy to bring samples of everything he
had, and we finally selected an apple from Oregon, a banana from Mexico,
a box of figs from California, some pop corn from Massachusetts,
chocolate from Venezuela, and salted nuts from Louisiana. The air and
the sunshine and the water seemed to be produced in New York, but
nothing else. A great dinner for a New York man, but to his surprise it
satisfied him, took the place of the chicken, and carried him through
his speech with a strong punch. It seems to me that one trouble with our
nut propaganda is that we go at it in such a way that the pupils regard
us somewhat as "nuts," and why should the man who becomes a specialist
on any subject, and airs it on all occasions, be called a nut? We shall
have to admit that men are called such names. I think it is because we
let our brains work somewhat like the oyster or clam, and secrete a hard
shell of formal knowledge around the sweet meat of condensed human
nature, for that is what all useful knowledge is. We must crack our
shell of formal knowledge and grind it up finer before we can put it
into the think works of the plain people.

While I was working up the Apple Consumers' League some years ago, I ran
upon the fact that Corbett, the prize-fighter, consumed 3 dishes of
apple sauce every day while training. Now, I had used the statement that
J. P. Morgan always had a baked apple for his lunch, but I got small
results from that story. Few people ever expected to make millions, and
Morgan was out of their class. Every man carried a punch, which he
wanted to enlarge and make effective. If Corbett used apple sauce to oil
his arm for a knock-out blow, every man with red blood wanted apples.
Now we must work our nut campaign in some such popular way, if we expect
to put a nut on the wheel of progress. The fact that Prof. Johnson, or
Dr. Jackson, or the Rev. Thompson, or Judge Dixon, or Senator Harrison,
find strength