88 ANNUAL REPORT 



know any better (up here along the line of the Northern Pacific road) 

 than to buy apricots, which Prof. Budd says may do well south of 

 parallel 41, and in tropical latitudes. Now, in order to protect such 

 men, we put every nurseryman in the Northwest under two thousand 

 dollars bonds to keep the "peace," as someone has it. It seems to me 

 we ought to have some way to protect ourselves from these frauds, 

 but most of the nurserymen seem to think we have not hit the right 

 thing; they do not doubt the honesty and good intentions of the par- 

 ties who got up this thing. I haven't a particle of feeling against 

 them; I believe they did it for the best. They supposed they were 

 working for the good of the greatest number. But I think with Mr. 

 Gibb, of Canada, that the law needs to be amended. 



President Elliot. I have listened with a good deal of interest to 

 what has been said. I suppose if there is any one man in this organi- 

 zation that is responsible for the passage of this law, that I have done 

 my share. T know I put in considerable work to secure its passage, 

 and I know how it was fought in the legislature by the tree men. I 

 know from the time we started with it until its final passage, it met 

 with determined opposition. The law has some features we did not 

 attempt to put in it, and they were perhaps put there by the tree men 

 themselves. 



Mr Dartt. To make it odious? 



President Elliot. To make it odious. We were obliged to take 

 such a law as we could get. We wanted some barrier put up against 

 these wholesale frauds. When a man comes into our country and 

 attempts to peddle stock grown in the South and East, and says it is 

 just as good as Minnesota grown stock, he is stating that which he 

 knows to be untrue. Experience here has taught us all that Ave have 

 got to come down to our own home-grown stock if we ever expect to 

 raise any fruit. Now, we may have put our foot into it in passing a 

 law of this kind, but where there is so much squirming among these 

 Eastern nurserymen and tree dealers, it shows that it must have hit 

 somewhere; it hit a tender spot. 



President Colman, in his address before the Nurseryman's Associa- 

 tion, in 1886, called the attention of nurserymen to the methods prac- 

 ticed for the distribution and sale of nursery stock, as not being what 

 it ought to be, when the business is conducted upon right and busi- 

 ness principles. And every time a man that is not interested in some 

 way, either in the sale of stock, or a member of a nurserymen's 

 association, or something of that kind, if honest to himself and he 

 tells his honest convictions, he will tell you that it was for the public 



