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TWENTY-NIXTH FRUIT-GROWERS' CONVENTION. 



the canned-fruit line in which I am interested — the great buyer? of this 

 country have been affected by the thought which is going the rounds 

 through the country th^t we are going to be faced by a financial panic, 

 and buyers have pursued an extremely conservative course in making 

 their purchases. In my own line, people who ordinarily buy from 25.000 

 to 30,000 cases of goods have satisfied themselves by buying from 500 

 to 1,000 cases, and some of them 2,000 cases, and then they supply their 

 needs as they require the goods. Now, that means that when they 

 need the goods they will have to buy them, and there is only one thing 

 that can deal with that condition of affairs, when it relates to Cali- 

 fornia raisins or California prunes, and that is the kind of an organi- 

 zation that Mr. Sprague is at the head of. Now, in the East, the buyers 

 of raisins have been met by this condition of affairs, from what I was 

 told, that at the beginning of the season a price was fixed by the Cali- 

 fornia Raisin-Growers' Association; the Association found that all the 

 raisins were not in their hands, and after fixing this price they decided, 

 after some buying had been effected, to drop the price to make the 

 people who had raisins outside of the Association lose money. That 

 was practically the object — to force them into the Association in time. 

 Now, this may be all very well from the standpoint of manipulation, 

 but the question is whether this was judicious. In the first place, it 

 discouraged the big buyers in the East right away, because the basis of 

 the prosperity of the business of handling California products, particu- 

 larly cured fruits, is a solid organization. Then the buyer, in making 

 purchases, knows that he will be protected in his purchases; but if in 

 the start, after making his purchases, the price drops and he loses 

 money thereon, it discourages him, not only discourages but it disgusts 

 him, and he says: Now I am just going to leave that market alone; 

 and instead of buying ten, fifteen, or twenty-five carloads of raisins he 

 will buy one car, and when he sells that he will bu}" another, because 

 he doesn't know how conditions are going to rule. So that it is a mistake, 

 in my judgment, to talk about overproduction in raisins. When the 

 proper methods are adopted, the real commercial methods, with the 

 right men to handle the business, you will find that the products 

 will go into consumption and that they will be successfully handled, 

 and they can only be handled through the means of a solid, co-oper- 

 ative organization. 



MR. WHITE. Mr. Chairman, I desire to correct a statement made 

 by Mr. Jacobs through error — I am satisfied that it is an error, and I 

 would not like to have it go before this Convention in that way — that 

 at first we had set a high price upon our product and afterwards 

 reduced the price, and thus discouraged the trade. Our information 

 early in the season was that the crop was going to be a short one, 

 shorter than that of the year before, but we realized that the wine men 



