THIRTY-FIFTH ANNUAL CONVENTION. 65 



cows. The owner says you have talked to them before and some 

 are doing better and some are not. He wanted me to think up 

 some scheme to wake them up. The next morning before I com- 

 menced he asked each man how many cows they delivered milk 

 from the year before. He found the lowest man delivered 2,800 

 pounds of milk per cow. Some 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, 6,000, and 

 7,000 and up to the highest 8,700 pounds. These two men lived 

 near together, 2,900 and 8,700 pounds. The man whose cows 

 had made the poor record sat near me, and he dropped his head. 

 When he said, "If you had cows that would only give 2,900 

 pounds what would you do with them?" I told him if I had 

 given those cows a decent chance to give milk and they only gave 

 2,900 pounds, I would sell them awfully quick. He wanted to 

 know if I would sell them to my neighbors. I said, "If you have 

 a neighbor that you don't like, if he is a mean cuss, and you want 

 to get even with him, you couldn't do him a worse trick than to 

 give him those cows." Then you can sit on your back porch and 

 see him working in the field laboring to grow crops to feed those 

 cows that will take a dollar's worth of feed and only return him 

 60 cents, and that is discounting the value of that man's life by 

 40 per cent, and that's a mean enough trick to come on any one. 

 I don't tell this so you can get even with your neighbors. The 

 purpose is just this if it would be a mean trick to give a neighbor 

 such cows, then a man is coming a mean trick on himself and 

 his family if he keeps them. There are a whole lot of fellows 

 in Illinois that are coming just such mean tricks on themselves 

 and families, maybe right here in Clinton, but there is no one 

 here like that this morning. 



How to Select Cows. 



How to select these cows. We want a cow that will take 

 our feed and convert it into the most profit, because if we are put- 

 ting in a part of our lives feeding cows and milking them, the 

 value of that part of our life is determined by the amount of 



