70 IOWA DEPAKTMENT OF AGRICULTUEE. 



statement which is not believed or understood, he has to prove it. He 

 must do one of two things, that is, take it back or prove it. (Laughter). 

 I believe that is a good habit, and I hope you will come at me today with 

 your broadaxes if I ever get off the track of your understanding or belief. 

 One thing, however, must be understood, and that is, that I might not 

 hear your questions, so I will ask you to write them out and give them to 

 me. Perhaps your chairman here will consent to act as middleman be- 

 tween us. 



My first idea of the middleman was obtained when I was a boy, 

 living on a small Cape Cod farm. An old Yankee in our town ran a 

 cider mill. He told three of us, all little boys, that if we would pick up 

 two barrels of apples under the seedling trees along the road and put 

 them into the hopper, he would give us all the cider we could suck through 

 a straw. Now, I have had ambitions in my day and many of them are now 

 dead; but looking back over a good many years, I don't think any of them 

 quite equal to the hope of getting my mouth at one end of a rye straw 

 with the other end dipping in a cider tank. So we worked like little slaves 

 and picked up those apples and poured them into the hopper. Then came 

 the owner with a regular Yankee trick. He told us we could have the 

 cider, if we could get it, but we could not come inside of the mill. You 

 might possibly scare off an Iowa boy by such a trick, but Cape Cod boys 

 are not built that way. "We went around the side of the mill and there we 

 found a knot-hole close by the cider tank. We went to my uncle's rye 

 field and picked up the longest straw we could find, and just as we were 

 running it through the knot-hole, out came the Yankee and caught us at 

 it. "I will fix you," he said, and he took two old rails and some boards 

 and built a fence around the knot-hole. Then he went back satisfied 

 that he had us going, but he didn't. We got the smallest boy to crawl, 

 like a wood-chuck, down under that fence. He took two straws. One 

 he ran through the knot-hole until it dipped into the cider, and he put 

 that in one side of his mouth; then he put the other straw into the other 

 side of his mouth and ran it out between a couple of boards in that fence, 

 and it was pull the cider out of the tank on one side and push it out 

 through the other straw, while we, on the outside, got a somewhat warm 

 liquid, which once was cold cider. Now, that was my first experience with 

 the middleman. 



I have run up against a good many of them since, and I have learned 

 that they are all the same. Their first ambition is to fill themselves up 

 with cider, then they lose interest in the job and forget to pass it 

 along. We had to take that little boy down to the spring and make him 

 drink water until you could see it in his eyes before he would pass any 

 of that cider on. Other forms of large middlemen that I have run up 

 against swallow large quantities of so-called water, and then turn about 

 and ask us to actually pay dividends on it, so that the middleman has come 

 to be one of the important factors in the development of farming. We 

 must, in part, at least, get away from him before we can hope to come 

 to our own. 



