DAIRY MI;e;TING. 201 



products that are manufactured whether on the farm or in the 

 factory. Distribution is attended with expense and the expense 

 is as legitimate as any item of expense in production. There 

 may be too many middlemen and they may get an undue share 

 of what the producer pays. Those things are evils that should 

 be treated specifically; but the blind, indiscriminate abuse of 

 middlemen does not appeal to me. In some lines of business 

 the middlemen become extremely skillful and are entitled to 

 some credit intermingled with criticism. It is skill of no small 

 ability to collect from thousands of New England producers 

 the daily milk supply for three-quarters of a million of people, 

 always enough to go around and with no loss-causing surplus, to 

 arrange for the sanitary transportation of that product, to re- 

 ceive it in the city on time every morning including Sundays 

 and holidays, to distribute it clean, pure, and safe to hundreds of 

 thousands of consumers every day, to collect the bills and make 

 prompt and regular payment to the producers. How many here 

 would care to undertake the job? And is it not proper that 

 skilled labor of this kind should have a reasonable return? Sup- 

 pose the farmers undertook to do this co-operatively (and I wish 

 they might) the same skill and experience would be required in 

 buying milk, in collecting it at railroad stations, in running 

 trains, in caring for the milk on those trains, in bottling, in ar- 

 ranging a city distribution system, in delivering it to the con- 

 sumers, in collecting the bills and making returns. And I imag- 

 ine it would be very nearly the same whether it is done by some 

 one who is regarded as a "malefactor of great wealth" or by the 

 producer himself. 



A third matter that has interested me much in connection with 

 events of the past few months relates to the sanitary phase of 

 the question. Opposition and skepticism still exist in the minds 

 of many milk producers, and fallacious arguments are still used 

 to prevent what seems to me to be a proper safeguarding of city 

 milk supplies from the sanitary standpoint. I have spoken on 

 this subject at previous meetings of this association and it has 

 also been ably handled this forenoon by another speaker ; there- 

 fore I will not dwell on it long at this time, but I see no reason 

 to retract or modify what I have said on this subject on other 

 occasions. As the years go by, increasing experience and study 

 are confirming the necessity for and reliability of the tuberculin 



