APPENDIX. 559 



came the property of this company. The last chapter of this book details 

 the final transfer to the American Trotting Register Association in 1891. 



With the fortunes of the Wallace publications since that transfer it may 

 be, perhaps, questioned whether this sketch has anything to do, and yet 

 it would seem incomplete without the sequel. As already stated, Wallace's 

 Monthly degenerated to nothing and died. The "Year Book " has been 

 emasculated until it is but a shadow, incomplete and unsatisfactory, of 

 what it was, and is notoriously published at a loss. Its once great tables 

 are cut from their complete state to be merely the tables of a single year, 

 and where one complete "Year Book "was in the Wallace regime the 

 only hand-book necessary, now the student must rummage through half 

 a dozen, more or less, 'to ascertain the simplest series of facts. The 

 standard has been mismanaged, revisions have been made and rescinded, 

 and no advance has been made in the speed qualifications, though 2:20 

 trotters are as common to-day as 2:30 trotters were in 1891. In con- 

 sequence, registration has fallen away, and from being a good purchase 

 at $130,000 in 1891, the "Register" properties to-day are rated so 

 dubiously far below par as to make the expression of their value 

 in figures hardly possible. That a period of "hard times" came shortly 

 after the purchase of the "Register" is true but the practical wrecking 

 of the Wallace publications cannot be accounted for solely on the theory 

 of business depression. 



Such in brief outline has been the story of the founding of these works, 

 which in their own upbuilding helped incalculably to upbuild one of the 

 nation's great industries. The present works may be destroyed or pass 

 away, but the true Wallace works cannot. Mr. Wallace's works have a 

 place in horse history, secure, unique, alone. Created, we might say from 

 nothing, they each and all grew and prospered in his care and guidance, 

 and became powers for good and auxiliaries of industry. If he is a bene- 

 factor who causes two blades of grass to grow where one grew before, how 

 much the more is he whose labor and genius have enriched ten thousand 

 farms, and been the most potent single influence in developing a produc- 

 tive industry the extent of which can only be estimated in millions. Mr. 

 Wallace's works will live after him. In speaking once on the transient 

 nature of fame, a distinguished lawyer, a man of national reputation, said: 

 "After I am gone I will be remembered as a successful lawyer among 

 many other successful lawyers, but Mr. Wallace's name will live as long as 

 a horse exists on the earth." We rarely judge contemporaries justly. It 

 needs the softening perspective of time in which to lose the dimming prej- 

 udices of the present; and however much these works may be appreciated 

 to-day, their true worth, what they accomplished, and the productive 

 genius, purposeful industry, and plain, consistent honesty from which they 

 were evolved will only be clearly seen and fully conceded by the historian 

 of the future. 



