STATE POMOI.OGICAL SOCIETY. 10/ 



and thereby enable us to form a larger and more powerful 

 company. 



Now it is almost impossible for a board of directors as a 

 whole to take up the general line of products in the State of 

 Maine, hay, fuel, butter, apples, potatoes, etc., and carry it 

 through ; consequently we have hit upon the scheme of appoint- 

 ing three men for directors, who will be virtually elected by the 

 men who are interested in apples, to look after the apple interest, 

 to be responsible for it ; three directors who will be elected and 

 probably recommended by the potato growers to look after that 

 interest and be responsible for it; and three for general prod- 

 ucts ; and the nine directors as a whole, as a body, will be the 

 advisers of the president, the electors of the general manager, 

 the overseers of the treasurer, and the general corporation, 

 except at the annual meeting. 



Now this company has incorporated itself for fifty thousand 

 dollars, a small sum to do a large business with. It is enough. 

 You understand this is an experiment — and it is not an experi- 

 ment entirely either, but it is an experiment that everybody is 

 trying. I see by the papers that even the milk producers around 

 Boston are tackling the same proposition and tackling it in 

 exactly the same way, only they don't intend to cover the same 

 general field that we do. Of course we are not in the milk 

 producing business. This is a general company, where a man 

 can send a bushel of apples or a bushel of potatoes, and have it 

 understood that it is in the hands of his friends, that it is going 

 to a party that is absolutely reliable, that he will get fair usage. 

 We have got to begin to do business somewhere. You under- 

 stand we could not open an ofiice in Portland unless we did it 

 by a system of drumming as the commercial houses do and go 

 out and buy a car load of apples or potatoes, and so on and so 

 forth. And Aroostook county is very much alive to this propo- 

 sition, and is up against propositions that we don't meet here, 

 because buyers of potatoes down there are in league and won't 

 pay only so much for potatoes anyhow, and they have notified 

 the wholesale houses in Boston that if they receive potatoes from 

 anybody except the shipping houses that the shipping houses 

 will blacklist them and that they won't ship to them. Now such 

 a case as that, you see we have got to have immense transactions 



