VERMONT DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 77 



"Something is wrong with you; your butter is not right." The price 

 accentuated the advice, and the farmer began to inquire and to say, 

 "What shall I do to be saved?" and the farmer was then on the right 

 road, and in my local paper every week I would publish columns of lists 

 of names they would bring in, what these men got for their butter. 

 What was the effect of this upon the community? Every man turned 

 student at once, and these men were getting hold of reading matter 

 and growing in knowledge and judgment, and along comes the cream- 

 ery and stepped in like a vail between the farmer and the effect of his 

 own work upon the market, and to-day there are hundreds of those 

 men that are not as good dairymen to-day as they were fifteen or 

 twenty years ago. They somehow stopped all interest in the thing when 

 it came to the creamery. Now what must they do? We cannot take 

 them back to the original condition, but we must do something more 

 with the creamery; we must make the creamery a seat of education to 

 each patron. One of the most effective ways I have seen is for every 

 creamery to publish an annual report, and every patron's name is 

 on your report, the number of cows he keeps, what kind oi cows, the 

 cost of keeping those cows, a cow census, and then how much he got 

 per cow at the creamery for his work. I tried it two years; it was a 

 hell upon earth; there was education in it. there was lots of it in that 

 report, and the farmers became informed as to what their real situa- 

 tion was. The Indiana Dairymen's Association shows what you can 

 do as a Dairymen's Association. Suppose it had been done here be- 

 fore the meeting of your Association. Suppose fifty herds-men about 

 here were interested to know just what they did accomplish from the 

 creamery daily. It would be necessary to have the creamery run 365 

 days of the year, so that the annual return in market and dollars and- 

 cents can be placed beyond the correction of the patron himself. 



In Wisconsin we have tried it now for three years. Last year there 

 were men side by side on the list who received $2.50 for every dollar they 

 expended, and right beside them men who got less than a dollar. 

 In doing this, in making out these lists, if you do not want to tell" the 

 man's name you can number them. I would advise you to do that. 



Now, I am going to talk to you a little while to-day, and I am 

 going to tell you I am glad it is my fortune once more to meet in the 

 old Green Mountain State with the representative dairymen. It is a 

 number of years since I came before you, but I have been with you lots 

 of times, almost every time your meeting has been held, in spirit. I 

 don't suppose I shall attend a great many more conventions; it does 

 not make any difference whether I do or not; the only thing for a 

 man to do in this world is to keep fighting, and as the Irishman said, 

 keep dying too, if necessary. 



A man said to me after the battle of Ft. Sumpter, "A man that 

 won't die a dozen times a day for his country is no man at all." 



I am going to speak to you to-day on "'Light Versus Darkness." 



