1376 
CTic RURAL NEW-YORKER 
The Rural New-Yorker 
THE EUSINESS FARMER’S PAPER 
A National Weekly Journal for Country and Suburban Homes 
Established isso 
Pnbllfihed weekly by the Rnral Pnblisbln^ Company, 833 tfeit 80th Street, \ew Torh 
Herbert W. Collingwood, President and Editor. 
John J. Dillon, Treasurer and General Manager. 
Wm. F. Dillon, Secretary. Mr-s. E. T. Royle, Associate Editor. 
SUBSCRIPTION : ONE DOLLAR A YEAR 
To foreign countries in the Universal Postal Union, $2.01, equal to Ss. Od., or 
81k marks, or 10)4 francs. Remit in money order, express 
order, personal check or bank draft. 
Entered at New York Post Office as Second Class Matter. 
Advertising rates, T.'i cents per agate line—7 words. References required for 
advertisere unknown to us ; and cash must accompany transient orders. 
“A SQUARE DEAL” 
tVe believe that every advertisement in this paper is backed by a respon¬ 
sible pei-son. We use every possible precaution and admit the advertising of 
reliable houses only. But to make doubly sure, we will make good any loss 
to paid subscribers sustained by trusting any deliberate swindler, irrespon¬ 
sible advertisers or misleading advertisements in our columns, and any 
such swindler will be publicly exposed. We are also often called upon 
to adjust differences or mistakes between our subscribers and honest, 
responsible houses, whether advertisers or not. We willingly use our good 
offices to this end, but such cases should not be confused with dishonest 
transactions. We protect subscribers against rogues, but we vrill not be 
responsible for the debts of honest bankrupts sanctioned by the courts. 
Notice of the complaint must be sent to us within one month of the time of 
the transaction, and to identify it, you should mention The Rural New- 
Yorker when writing the advertiser. 
N O N. Y. reader of The R. N.-Y. can say he has 
not been warned about the new cider law. You 
can sell sweet cider or legal vinegar without a 
licen.se, but fermented or “hard" cider is now classed 
as intoxicating liquor, and you must have a liquor 
license in order to sell it legally. You will sell it 
upon your own responsibility, and now, if any of our 
readers have trouble over this they cannot say they 
wei'e not warned in time. * 
* 
S HALL the New York State Fair be made free— 
with no charge for admission? That question 
must be answered some day. We might as Avell be¬ 
gin to discuss it. The Kansas State Fair is open, 
free to ^11, and this feature has greatly increased the 
attendance, while exhibits have not fallen oft in 
interest. In New York the city of Syracuse benefits 
greatly from the fair, and Onondaga County might 
well follow the example of Shawnee Co., Kansas, 
and raise part of the money for premiums by local 
taxation. We now have reports from many smaller 
fairs where admission is made free. In every case 
this feature has proved very successful. The at¬ 
tendance is increased and interest is keener. The 
State Fair is supposed to be a part of agricultural 
education, and should be as free to the people as any 
other educational feature, with the expenses paid by 
those Avho benefit mostly by it. 
* 
( 4 ’n'OOD CONSERVATION!” There are a good 
Jl many people in this country who feel like 
running for cover when these words are spoken. 
There ought to be a conservation of words in the 
tons of advice now being so freely offered. It is a 
dull morning or the mails are delayed when we do 
not get at least 30,000 words of advice on “conserva¬ 
tion” of one thing or another. Give us the money 
spent for printing, paper and postage in the con¬ 
veyance of this advice and we will agree to feed a 
good-sized army. Does anyone read all this “litei’a- 
ture”? We doubt it. The chief use that we have 
observed for it is to keep the rust off the waste bas¬ 
ket. Here is a specimen which is designed for the 
“woman’s pages of farm jouraals”: 
Scrap your old ideas, forget your old habits. Business 
is not as usual, nothing is as usual. Accustomed routine 
has yielded to tense, quick action. The very air is 
vibrant with the will to do and the spirit of courageous 
adventure. Old grouches are forgotten and old wu-ongs 
left to right themselves; everyone is busy and most of 
us are happy. The food adventure is part of the game. 
So scrap your old kitchen ideas, too, and adventure into 
the realm of food. 
We do not know who wrote that, but we will 
guarantee the aiithor never cooked a meal in a farm 
kitchen, never stood up against a strenuous farm 
day, and that he or she has not the slightest under¬ 
standing of the farm housewife’s problems, “Forget 
old habits!” Why, man, do you realize that you are 
talking to women who for years have fed the men- 
folks and a brood of sturdy children and kept them 
strong and healthy? Surely “business is not as 
usual” when we are asked to peddle out underdone 
guff as serious advice. It may be as this friend says, 
that “old grouches are forgotten,” but this sort of 
thing will make new ones faster than you can count 
them. Let this man try a few “food adventures” on 
himself! New York women are not victim.s—they 
are voters! 
* 
T he egg-laying contests have pi'oved the value of 
utility poultry as nothing else could do. Of 
course, we all knew before these contests started that 
one hen could outlay another, but that was about all 
we did know. The contests, with their accurate i*ec- 
ords of feeding and egg production, have given us 
exact figures. More than that, they have forced us 
to try to find out why one hen is better than an¬ 
other. We find that a hen must be bred for la.ving 
and huiU for laying in order to excel. We have not 
gone far enough to be entirely sure of the influence 
of breeding, but the art of studying the build or 
shape of the laying hen has made wonderful prog¬ 
ress. The egg-laying contests now are not entirely 
between hens any more, but there is a side line of 
competition between what we call drone hunters. 
Many of the pens represent the skill of an expert 
who has studied the hen as an egg-laying machine — 
not as a carrier of improved blood. These experts 
are now casting- out the drones with an accuracy 
which is .surprising. There are plenty of cases 
where these students of a hen can throw out 40 per 
cent of a flock without lowering the egg record by 
five per cent. The contests are largely responsible 
for this interest in drone killing, which is being de¬ 
veloped more and more as conditions grow harder. 
Necessity knows no love for a drone. 
* 
On November 7 the game protector of Delaware Co., 
N. Y., happened into my father’s dairy barn just at 
milking time and fined him $25 for trapping muskrats 
out of season. There is a pond about 150 feet from the 
barn which father gets his ice from to cool milk in 
Summer time. The muskrats got into this pond and 
he caught them so his pond would not be ruined, only 
protecting his own property from damage, but never¬ 
theless he is out his $25 and the three hides he had, 
which the game protector took. Some law; no one 
knows who the right man is nowadays. j. h. m. 
New York, 
Y es, indeed! It is “.some law” when a man may 
be fined for protecting his own property. This 
is the limit thus far. If anyone can beat this for an 
idiotic enforcement of a fool law, we want to hear 
from him at once. Our readers are entitled to the 
top notch of stupidity as well as of wisdom. The 
only thing is that we shall continue to have just 
such things until w^e have 50 farmers in the New 
York, Legislature. 
N OW and then there comes a man who thinks 
that because we pei* *mit some writer to air his 
views The R. N.-Y. fully endorses them. We usu¬ 
ally have little trouble in showing people where we 
stand on public matters, and we do not permit 
others to state the ca.se for us. We try to give all 
sides a fair hearing, and we often print articles with 
which we do not agree in order that our people may 
tear them apart and expose their fallacy. Some¬ 
times we attempt to do this ourselves. In other ca.ses 
we turn the matter over to our readers, who, we are 
frank to say, usually do a better job than we can. 
Facts and the statement of evident truths about one 
.side of a question may conrtnce, but do not usually 
convert. Analysis of an argument is needed for 
that, and the thought required to show up a clever 
false argument is the finest mental drill in the 
world. So we sometimes let people talk in order to 
provide this drill. Rest assured that when we want 
our position on any question stated we will .state it 
ourselves! 
* 
This new word “camouflage” which you suggest in 
connection with Senator Elon R, Brown ! Can you give 
us a definition of it in plain English ? s. D. K. 
The Literary Digest prints the following: 
“Humbugging Disguise. Its main principle is the de¬ 
struction of outline by paint or other artifice.” 
T hus it is much the same thing'as “faking,” and 
the person who deliberately makes use of it should 
be called a “fake.” In these days most politicians 
are painting words around their record so as to 
pass for “friends of the farmer.” The “r” in friends 
is the “camouflage.” Cut it out and you have them 
for what they are. As a rule, this “r” is so well 
grafted onto a politician that you will have to cut 
him out in order to get rid of the letter. It must 
be confessed that Senator Brown has long succeeded 
in dazzling the men of Jefferson and Oswego with 
his “camouflage.” Now the women are to vote, and 
they will go after Senator Brown with brooms and 
mops. We once knew a case where a big bluffer 
held up a farmer and the hired man, when a small 
woman drove him out of the yard with a mop handle. 
The women are after Senator Brown, and how they 
will rip up his “camouflage”! For once we feel 
sorry for him—for a woman with a vote is truly a 
Goddess of Liberty! 
r llE Neic York school law! The response to our 
call for fact and experience has been instant 
and strong. We have a flood of letters from country 
people, and 99 per cent of the correspondence thus 
far is in the form of protest against the law. Here 
comes our first chance to get together in the non¬ 
partisan league. We are sending the following let¬ 
ter to rural members of the Legislatui-e as a starter: 
Dear Sir—As you doubtless know, there is strong op¬ 
position among country people to the new school law, 
passed by the last Legislature. This opposition seems 
to be general and well supported by facts. There will 
December 1, 1917 
he an effort made in the next Legislature to amend or 
repeal this law. I would like to ask, respectfully, what 
position you will take. If it can be shown that the 
farmers and country people in your district are sin¬ 
cerely opposed to the law, will you vote for its repeal 
or change? 
Let us put them on record and then we can get to¬ 
gether, decide just what we want done with that 
law, and go to work for it. A few words from you 
right now will help your representative to make up 
his mind. 
♦ 
A FARMER in New Jersey lives in a consolidated 
school district and his children are carried to 
school. This farmer thinks he can compel the 
driver of the school wagon to come to his farm for 
the children, while the driver says the children must 
come to a certain place on the road. Which is right? 
We get the following opinion from the State Com¬ 
missioner of Education: 
The board of education is authorized to provide a 
transportation route which must be a route that shall 
accommodate the greatest number of children. The law 
does not provide that the route shall be so established 
as to go to the homes of all the children. It is estab¬ 
lished just as a trolley route or a railroad route is es¬ 
tablished, the purpose being to take the place of trolley 
and railroad transportation when these latter methods 
of transportation are not available. 
Thus, under this law, the farmer cannot insist that 
the driver must come to his door for the children. 
* 
P RESIDENT WILSON, Mr. Herbert Hoover and 
other leading men have tried to obtain infor¬ 
mation about farmers and farming. Not knowing 
personally about such things, they have called in 
representatives or officers of various agricultural 
societies. The information such men have given has 
vitally affected the welfare of farmers and the na¬ 
tion as a wdiole. That is one great trouble with the 
present .situation. In most cases the men who repre¬ 
sented these societies wei-e not farmers at all, and 
had little knnwledge of pi'actical farm conditions or 
sympathy for farmers. When the president of such 
an organization is a manufacturer, the secretary a 
feed dealer gnd the treasurer a law'yer, they cannot 
give the real farm point of view. We are now suffer¬ 
ing from public policies put into force through the 
advice of men who are interested in farming only as 
a side issue. It is a frosted cake rather than a 
bread and butter policy. The time has now come 
when the representative officers of agricultural so¬ 
cieties must be actual farmers. Cut out the editors, 
the professors, the bankers, lawyers, manufacturers, 
merchants, politicians and landlords. Put no man 
at the head of these societies unless he makes what 
we may call his primary income out of actual work 
on the land. No other man can truly represent 
farmers and farming, and if these societies are to 
represent anything else they should change their 
name. Of course, we may not be able to honor some 
worthy or rich or influential person if we do this, 
but hunt up some other honor for him, and do not 
play or potter with a situation which means so 
much for the nation. It is very clear that the gov¬ 
ernment authorities do not understand the farm situ¬ 
ation or the sentiment of farmers. They never will 
understand so long as near or plaything farmers 
represent our industry. Let farmers he represented 
hy farmers! 
Brevities 
A GOOD phosphate puts backbone into manure. 
A TONGUE sandwich—trying to get in a word during 
a curtain lecture. 
Someone has said that baby carriages and life pre¬ 
servers are the only things not made of concrete. 
This year sees more forest leaves raked up for com¬ 
post or bedding then ever before. 
Many a child has been made deaf by a “box” on the 
ear. If you must box them, take some part of the body 
where there are no “inside works.” 
We must say that the argument for dusting in the 
place of spraying to kill leaf-eating insects grows strong¬ 
er as new reports come in. 
Now comes an “adviser” who tells farmers they 
should leave their other work and go and cut wood to 
help the coal shortage. 
In order to help “conserve” food, the city of Mo¬ 
bile, Ala., has passed an ordinance allowing people to 
keep pigs in the city (except in congested districts), 
provided the pens are kept clean. 
After November 15, any person found with ex¬ 
plosives in his possession and without a license from the 
Federal Government, will be arrested and subject to 
$5,000 fine or one year’s imprisonment—one or both! 
The ideal food conservators of all history were Jack 
Spratt and his wife—one could eat no fat and the other 
ate no lean. They were true exponents of “the go.spel 
of the clean plate.” 
M’Ihen we printed that story of the New England 
farmer and his experience with thieves we asked if any¬ 
one could match it. M'e have found another ca.se that is 
worse yet—in New England again. 
