INTRODUCTION 



13 



as notorious manipulations of judging commit- 

 tees in the present day as ever occurred in the 

 past. As I said before there are three courses 

 open to the honest exhibitor who desires to 

 bring his cattle before the public at the great 

 shows. He must either (first) protest and prove 

 these nefarious practices; (second) practice 

 these unworthy methods himself, or (third) 

 submit tamely and allow the unscrupulous ex- 

 hibitor to win unmerited prizes and escape 

 unscathed. The one redeeming feature of the 

 show ring is that the unscrupulous exhibitors 

 are a very small minority, so that whenever 

 those who show fairly and honestly get to- 

 gether and protest in a body against crooked 

 practices they can be overthrown, but as a rule 

 up to this time exhibitors have preferred to 

 allow these frauds to go unrebuked, because of 

 the prominence of the parties committing 

 them, or of a desire to keep peace regardless of 

 price. Again, the class of exhibitors commit- 

 ting these depredations on the show ring 

 usually last but a little while. They are, as it 

 were, meteors, who come out and, to use their 

 own language, "make a killing" in the prize 

 ring for a year or two, and then disappear, only 



to be followed by some similar fraud upon 

 whom their mantle invariably falls. As I said 

 before, these unpleasant parts of the book are 

 left as their author shaped them. Mr. Miller 

 and my father had the habit of calling things 

 by their real names, and both were accustomed 

 to tell the truth regardless of who were hurt 

 or benefited thereby, and therefore I have felt 

 constrained to adopt the policy that was forced 

 upon Pontius Pilate and say, "What is written 

 is written." They could never in life forgive 

 the garbling of their statements by the editor, 

 and I could not be party to such action now 

 that they are not here to protest for them- 

 selves. 



This is Mr. Miller's work, and as such is 

 submitted as the best work ever published on 

 cattle. If every stockman in America will read 

 this work and act upon its suggestions, in the 

 light of its teachings, more will be accom- 

 plished in the profitable upbuilding of the beef 

 interests of America in one decade hereafter 

 than has heretofore been accomplished in a 

 century. T. F. B. SOTHAM. 



Chillicothe, Mo., 



April 14th, 1902. 



