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prompt, that if the growers would supply their own money to do the 

 business they could have it done exactly as they pleased, and I had 

 nothing further to say; for he was right; and we cannot have it done 

 as we please in any other way. Fresh fruit is perishable, and the trade 

 in it risky, and so long as commission houses are expected to advance 

 freight on all fruit, and make additional advances on a large part of it, 

 they will conduct the business with reference to their own interests 

 first; they will not involve their capital on any other terms; and neither 

 would any one else here present. 



The California Fruit Union was an earnest attempt to concentrate the 

 fresh fruit shipments under one management. It did not do it and could 

 not do it simply because the great mass of growers were fools enough to 

 permit sharp opposition agents to work upon their prejudices; and they 

 are just the same now. Any plan of cooperation which presupposes man 

 to be an animal governed by the reason with which he is endowed is 

 foredoomed to disaster; the Lord did not create us that way, and we 

 must not count on it. Successful cooperation must be based on a 

 knowledge of our own nature as it is, and not as it might be. In the 

 case of the Fruit Union, during its later years the cry became almost 

 universal throughout the State among its members, that the Union was 

 a fraud and a humbug because it made use of an established firm as 

 Eastern agents. "Great heavens," they said, "the Fruit Union was the 

 same as Porter Bros.! " Well, what if it was! The important point for 

 us was to get all our fruit shipments under one management; who con- 

 stituted the management made no difference to us, so long as it was 

 competent — and I never heard incompetence charged in this case — and 

 yet we permitted sharp men to so work upon our prejudice as to defeat 

 our own interest; and at the same time we showed our imbecility by 

 regularly sending our annual proxies to those whom we knew would 

 continue the agency. In the name of common sense if we wished a 

 change in the management, why did we not send proxies to those who 

 would elect Directors to make a change? It is simply because we are 

 not built that way. If we revived that plan we should do the same 

 thing right over. When the Fruit Union was started, the business 

 was what we should now call very small; the times were prosperous, 

 and growers not seriously involved by advances; there was but one 

 vigorous private firm in the business, and the competition of that 

 was wisely removed by making it the Eastern agency. Now there 

 are I know not how many, all struggling for business, all fortified 

 with fruit tied up with advances, and by acquaintance and trade rela- 

 tions; by our own folly we have lost the opportunity that we had, and it 

 will not return. 



In speaking of our folly in business affairs, I am not speaking of 

 fruit growers, but of mankind. The trade of organization is no new one 

 to me; all my business life I have been engaged in it, formerly in seek- 

 ing to unite merchants and manufacturers for common objects, and 

 speaking not as a theorist but as an expert, I declare unhesitatingly 

 that there is no class of men on the earth so easy to organize and keep 

 organized as farmers, and no other class of the same numbers engaged 

 in independent business that it would be possible to organize at all. I 

 suppose there are a dozen commission houses in the California fresh 

 fruit trade; I would far rather attempt the organization of all the farmers 



