70 
AMERICAN POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
among the commission merchants, has reached a degree of tensity, that neces- 
sitates the employment of solicitors for every house doing business at the 
various stations and wharves. Why not purchasers instead of solicitors? 
The large per cent of human leeches, whose business and financial responsi- 
bility has for its only support their ability to deceive and defraud, whose 
lungs would be congested by one honest breath, would thus be driven out 
of the business, to the great relief of reputable and responsible parties now 
in the commission business. This must ultimately be the situation. It can 
not be accomplished at once, but the trend of public sentiment is forcefully 
setting in that direction. The innumerable abuses to which present methods 
are open and subject, are annually growing more and more intolerant. A 
careful scrutiny of the practical details and operations of marketing, largely 
warrant the opinion, that in them is greater promise of an abundant harvest 
for the unpopular monopolist of sulphur in the lower regions, than in either 
the legal profession or the broad field of politics. Many attempts at local 
protection, by organization of “Unions,” etc., in different localities, have 
failed to relieve or amend satisfactorily the situation of the shippers, as is 
evidenced by the fact, that no plan of that kind has spread beyond the cir- 
cumscribed locality of its origin. It is not generally feasible or practicable, 
for the grower to know at all times, the exact condition of the large city 
markets. Often he is situated several miles from his shipping point, con- 
tending and battling with circumstances that compel him to send his perish- 
able products to the station or whaff, as the case may be, with directions 
that they be consigned to a certain commission merchant. The market 
where his favorite is operating may have been overloaded— choked up by an 
over-supply of the previous day; the check covering net proceeds that is 
remitted to him by the salesman, withers his hopes and implants in his mind 
the unchangeable belief that he was robbed. Disappointed, exasperated and 
smarting under this belief, he has resort to the plan of— shipping to another 
man, in the same market. 
There never was, and doubtless, never will be a successful, smooth running 
organization of the tillers of the soil, into anything except an unmitigated 
band of pig-heads; distrustful and suspicious of every thing and every body 
fengaged in the same avocation; incapable of profiting in any way by the 
countless failures of bad and defective customs that demoralize and make 
business unprofitable. Painfully and palpably protruding from poorly di- 
rected individual effort— the legitimate offspring of obstinate vanity masquer- 
ading in the garb of independence — are the buds that blossom into rich har- 
vests for the sharks who despoil and besmirch the commission business. 
Admit that organizations will not survive in our honorable occupation as 
horticulturalists, when applied to marketing, such admission falls far short 
of argument favoring the continuance of the prevailing plan that makes 
hypocrisy and deception a pastime, honesty a hideous nightmare, and self : 
respect a bitter fabrication; a plan that bears the same operative and practi- 
cal relation to the great horticultural interest of the country, that soft, 
sticky clay does to the wheels that pass through it. Assembled here is the 
honored Society of American Pomology, the history of which bears the 
ineffaceable impress of the wisdom and philanthropy of such noble types of 
American manhood, as the Downings, Wilder, Warder,- Barry and many 
others. Speaking in a pomological sense— shall we play the role of degenerate 
sons of worthy sires, by a specious adherence to a conservatism, out of which 
reticently emanates a servility to these wrongs and evils, that menace the 
