286 STATE HORTICULTURAL, SOCIETY. 



Now, I am an outsider; I never had an agent in my life, and I might still 

 he the man to speak on these questions; but it seems to me that Mr. Emery 

 must have written his paper during very gloomy weather, and instead of 

 emeri/ing off the facts, he got at them with a broadaxe. It ought to be 

 understood, with nurserymen having agents, whether the nurseryman is 

 responsible, or whether these agents are men that go and buy a lot of stuff 

 that is only fit to be put on the briish pile, and sell it out in their own 

 name, or adopt some name and sail under false colors and claim that they 

 have it from some reliable nursery. We have sometimes run across 

 catalogues that were fac similes of ours — did not give the printer's name, 

 l>ut with my name, the name of my firm — and those men were selling stock 

 under the names in our catalogues. I don't know where they got it; they 

 certainly kept clear of us, and they did it so slyly that it was some time 

 before we found out about it. We heard it by Tom, Dick, and Harry 

 writing to rls, saying, "Your agents sold us something (whatever it 

 happened to be) and it was black at the heart," or some such thing. Now, 

 that is foPowed up more than it ought to be, and I think that a body of 

 men like you ought to get together and separate the sheep from the goats. 

 We know very well that men in such cities as Rochester, and where these 

 gentlemen live, — Geneva, and that great Miami valley — must have men to 

 sell their stock; they can not go around the country and sell it themselves, 

 and they ought to have men to sell their stock that are a credit to the 

 business. Can't you men get together and employ honorable men, the same 

 as Marshall Field, J. V. Farwell & Co., and such men? They send out 

 agents and they are doing an honorable business. If that is a sample of 

 the nursery business, that Mr. Emery has given, I pity the rest of you ; I 

 have got through with it; but it seems to me that young men like you ought 

 to make the nursery business respectable. There are other things our men 

 act very foolish about, and do not act in a business-like way. I was down 

 to Rochester at the national convention a few years ago, and a gentleman, 

 a great admirer of trees and advocate of tree-planting — he has perhaps 

 been the means of having more trees planted than any man in America — 

 wrote me to send in a resolution in regard to the duty on foreign trees, and 

 wanted me to present it myself to the meeting at Rochester, or have Mr. 

 Barry or Dr. Warder present it. I took nobody into my confidence but 

 Mr. Barry and Mr. Meehan; "Why," said they, "there are numbers of men 

 that would be in favor of knocking the duty off everything." It was not 

 politics; it was a question of bread and butter. Now, those men told me 

 that there was a majority in the house today that would vote to have the 

 duty taken off foreign trees, and we older men knew how it was. They can 

 grow them in Europe so much cheaper than you can here ; and they have 

 this advantage — when you have an overstock you put it on the brush-pile; 

 when they have an overstock they ship it to New York, and it is piled into 

 this country, and it does not help the citizens, because most of it dies; I 

 know about the quality of the stock. I experimented with it and spent a 

 great deal of money on it, because at that time there was a duty of 30 per 

 cent, ad valorem and fruit was worth about 180 or 190 per cent, of what it is 

 now, so that it allowed quite a margin, and then I had friends all over the 

 country that were willing to patronize me. I wasted seed experimenting 

 in different ways. I went to work, in the first place and sowed four acres, 

 and everything went along very nicely, and one day there was a rain and 

 thunder storm and the sun came out very bright afterward, and I went 

 down and looked at my seedlings, and they were as dead as King Henry 



