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TWENTY-NINTH FRUIT-GROWERS' CONVENTION. 



cent of that 92 or 93 per cent. Everybody in this community, no 

 matter whether a shoeblack, a banker, a barber, or a butcher, realized 

 that the success of this Association is the success of every individual 

 here. It was only by supreme effort on the part of everybody in this 

 community that we succeeded in holding it together. I do not think 

 you could ever get 100 per cent of growers in any organization of this^ 

 kind on the face of the earth. Now, we thought we had 93 per cent, 

 and yet out of a total of 118,000,000 pounds the Association has 

 received 96,000,000 pounds, and outside of the Association there are 

 about 22,000,000 pounds. We know that positively, and we know posi- 

 tively that men who signed the contract delivered part of their goods 

 to the Association and then in the "wee sma' hours" of the morning 

 hauled their goods to an outside packer. We know that men will sign 

 with the Association and then go to outside packers to see if they can 

 get a bid on their goods, and if they can get more for their raisins by 

 so doing they will leave the Association in the lurch and sell to the 

 outside packer. We know that men deliver their goods both to the 

 outside packer and to the inside packer, thus working against their own 

 interests. We know that men will go around and solicit every grower 

 in the country to sign these contracts and will preach to them the doc- 

 trine of co-operation, and will come into our office and preach it to us, 

 and yet have never signed a contract with the Association. That is one 

 of the problems we are up against. 



There has been a great deal of criticism about the board of directors 

 reducing the price of raisins this season. Whenever I vote for a 

 director to represent me in any organization, I do so because I think he 

 has intelligence enough to attend to my business for me. The idea 

 of electing a small body of men to represent a large body is because in 

 that way the business can be done more successfully and more profit- 

 ably for the whole mass. The board of directors has been censured 

 repeatedly because it does not publish the details of the business. To 

 do so would be to frustrate the very point the Association was trying to 

 reach. We have traced up whence all this squealing has come, and 

 have found that it is from the pen of the outsiders. It is not from the 

 man who has been supporting the Association. It is from the man 

 who has received the benefits of the Association ever since it was formed 

 without paying a dollar or a nickel toward its support. We are run- 

 ning our business jto suit ourselves and the gentlemen whom we repre- 

 sent. These outsiders never extend any sympathy to us. They were 

 getting the cream of the market in the opening of the season, because 

 they were cutting under us. They never said a word, they never 

 apologized then for not placing a little money in our hands to help 

 defray the expenses of keeping up the organization, but they now com- 

 plain because we did not advise them beforehand of what we were going 



