SEVENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII. 261 



PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 

 S. B. SHILLING, MASON CITY, lA. 



Ladies and Gentlemen: For the fourth time I have the pleasure of 

 standing before you for the purpose of giving my annual address, and I 

 find myself considerably at a loss to know just what to say to you. I 

 have endeavored, upon former occasions, to fully cover the ground, and 

 anything that I might say to you at this time must necessarily be more 

 or less of a repetition of what I have already said to you before; I will 

 promise you, therefore, that I will be very brief. 



I trust that I will not be considered egotistical if I again, as upon 

 former occasions, refer to our splendid financial condition as shown by the 

 report of our Treasurer, to which you have just listened. If I were to 

 bestow honor and praise where it properly belongs for this splendid show- 

 ing, it would be on the butter makers of the State, and the generosity of 

 the supply, and the commission firms throughout the country. They, 

 appreciating our helpless condition in the fact that we have to rely 

 wholly upon our own resources for the maintaining of our organization, 

 have been indeed generous to us, for which we feel duly grateful. 



It is with feelings of regret, I can assure you, that I am again forced 

 to stand before you and acknowledge that, although there has been a 

 session of our Legislature, our organization is still without the aid it so 

 much stands in need of. It has been the one desire and ambition of my 

 life to see our organization placed upon an equal footing with our sister 

 States. We tried hard to accomplish this, but our appeals, as upon 

 former occasions, fell upon deaf ears. 



They made the excuse to us that the session was to be a short one, 

 in the nature of aspecial session, made necessary by the change in the 

 laws passed by the previous Legislature, and that no appropriations 

 would be made other than what was absolutely necessary to pay the 

 running expenses of the State government. I will leave it to your intel- 

 ligence, without comment, as to whether they did this or not. 



Defeat in this matter should only stimulate our determination to 

 secure this in the end. With the opening of the next session of our 

 Legislature, the dairymen should again be on hand with their bill. They 

 must keep on agitating the question until the legislators, through the 

 people, are made to understand that the dairy industry, the greatest 

 wealth producing industry in this great State of ours, is entitled to con- 

 sideration at their hands. That we will not be ignored; that our claim 

 is a just one; that we are not asking for money to increase the salary of 

 any one, but to pay the legitimate expenses of disseminating the knowl- 

 edge of how to still further increase the profits from this industry. 



