The recommendation contained in the report of the Secretary for 1893 that the vicious system of promiscuous free distribution of its departmental documents be abandoned is again urged.  These publications may well be furnished without cost to public libraries, educational institutions, and the officers and libraries of States and of the Federal Government; but from all individuals applying for them a price covering the cost of the document asked for should be required.  Thus the publications and documents would be secured by those who really desire them for proper purposes.  Half a million of copies of the report of the Secretary of Agriculture are printed for distribution, at an annual cost of about $300,000.  Large numbers of them are cumbering storerooms at the Capitol and the shelves of secondhand-book stores throughout the country.  All this labor and waste might be avoided if the recommendations of the Secretary were adopted.

The Secretary also again recommends that the gratuitous distribution of seeds cease and that no money be appropriated for that purpose except to experiment stations.  He reiterates the reasons given in his report for 1893 for discontinuing this unjustifiable gratuity, and I fully concur in the conclusions which he has reached.

The best service of the statistician of the Department of Agriculture is the ascertainment, by diligence and care, of the actual and real conditions, favorable or unfavorable, of the farmers and farms of the country, and to seek the causes which produce these conditions, to the end that the facts ascertained may guide their intelligent treatment.

A further important utility in agricultural statistics is found in their elucidation of the relation of the supply of farm products to the demand for them in the markets of the United States and of the world.

It is deemed possible that an agricultural census may be taken each year through the agents of the statistical division of the Department.  Such a course is commended for trial by the chief of that division.  Its scope would be: 

(1) The area under each of the more important crops. (2) The aggregate products of each of such crops. (3) The quantity of wheat and corn in the hands of farmers at a date after the spring sowings and plantings and before the beginning of harvest, and also the quantity of cotton and tobacco remaining in the hands of planters, either at the same date or at some other designated time.

The cost of the work is estimated at $500,000.

Owing to the peculiar quality of the statistician’s work and the natural and acquired fitness necessary to its successful prosecution, the Secretary of Agriculture expresses the opinion that every person employed in gathering statistics under the chief of that division should be admitted to that service only after a thorough, exhaustive, and successful examination at the hands of the United States Civil Service Commission.  This has led him to call for such examination of candidates for the position of assistant statisticians, and also of candidates for chiefs of sections in that division.