"= ae) °. 
~~ 
HORTICULTURAL FRAUDS. 273 
the Florence apple, said to have been originated by Mr. Gideon, of 
Excelsior. They showed it on their sample books as a large apple, 
as Jarge as or larger than the Wolf River. They say itis hardy, does 
not blight and a good keeper. The factof the matteris,it is a small 
apple, smaller than the Transcendent. Well, people buy those 
trees, pay fifty cents apiece for them, when they are entirely worth- 
less to them. You may call them fools if you will, but that does not 
help the matter any. A great many buy to get rid of the agent. 
People are buying those trees; a lot of them have been sold in Wis- 
consin. 
Men will buy trees, but after they bear they swear they will 
never buy another tree. A man told me last winter, “1 never had 
but one tree agent tell me the truth. He was selling the Salome 
apple, and he said it would keep all winter, and it will, for there is 
nothing on the place will eat it. He told the truth that time.” Those 
agents go into localities where they have no horticultural meetings 
to sell their goods; they know all such localities. They sell them 
what they purport to be fine, large apples, budded on some hardy 
stock, and when they come to bear they are little, worthless things, 
no good on earth, and they curse the whole business. Itis all right 
if a man can be placed on his own responsibility; there should bea 
power behind the throne; some one should be heldresponsible,or run 
the fellows out of town. We have plenty of nurserymen who are 
selling good trees of their own throughout our state. We should 
induce people to buy from our own nurserymen and run those fel- 
lows out who travel through the country and tell anything to sell 
their stuff. 
Mr. Brand: We havea law on our statute books, or I do not know 
that it is a statute law either, but [ know there was a case brought 
before the supreme court of the state twenty years or more ago that 
applied to this whole question of fraud. A man had ordered a bill 
of trees from a Minnesota nurseryman, grown in Minnesota, so the 
agent represented, and when he delivered the trees he furnished 
trees from Wisconsin, and the man that had ordered them neglected 
to go after them. He was sued in the justice court, and judgment 
was rendered against him; but heappealed it tothe district court,and 
the judgment of the lower court was reversed, and the grounds on 
which it was reversed was that the man undertook to introduce evi- 
dence to show that fraud was intended and was not permitted to do 
so. The agent was beaten in the district court and carried it to the 
supreme court, and the supreme court sustained the decision of the 
district court that the man should have been permitted to introduce 
evidence showing fraud. It is plain to my mind that if evidence 
were allowed to be introduced to show the nature of the fraud, as 
the supreme court decided there might be, these agents could not 
get judgment even in a justice court, and this would furnish the 
farmers of the state a sufficient remedy, and I do not believe there 
is necessity for any fnrther legislation. 
The reason why we had the last law—and 1 believe I had as much 
to do with it as anybody—was this: I had been traveling in a num- 
ber of different states, and I knew they had a law with the same pro- 
visions, and it operated as a scarecrow to keep a good many of those 
