250 
THE NATIONAL NURSERYMAN 
Of course if we fail to pay eventually and the notes 
were non-collectible, then, and only then, would you 
have to put up the cash or lose anything but this has 
never happened. 
If you ever did business in New York State you 
would find that a very large volume of business was 
done without actual cash. 
However, I do not pretend to tell your firm how to 
run your business.” 
Now that is pretty rough on the credit of New York 
State and I am glad to say that my experience with the 
credit of New York State nurserymen has been, as a rule 
very satisfactory. 
The regular “dead beat” plies his vocation in the nur¬ 
sery trade, as in all other businesses, and his methods of 
obtaining credit is sometimes quite ingenious, as the fol¬ 
lowing circumstance will illustrate. 
A certain man in Buffalo wrote asking if we would 
give him sixty days credit on a small bill of goods. He 
and his wife was suing him for desertion. He had 
skipped, leaving her with several children and no money. 
Sometime after, he turned up in Chicago, and on the 
strength of his so called “intimacy” with “Tommy Mee¬ 
han” he tried to buy a bill of goods from a nurseryman 
there, and when that would not work, offered a check for 
a little more than the amount of the bill and asked for 
the change in cash. Fortunately our Chicago friends 
were wiser than we and turned down the proposition and 
yet they call it the “wild and woolly west.” 
But why continue? No doubt every one of you has 
had more or less similar experiences, and we will con¬ 
tinue to burn our fingers from time to time. 
Nurserymen should keep one thought constantly in 
their mind. Protect your credit at any cost. A good 
credit is a nurseryman’s best asset. Once his credit is 
impaired, he is on the toboggan. 
Locke says:—“Credit is nothing but the expectation of 
money, within some limited time.” 
Nurserymen and their families at their Annual 
My personal opinion is that he should have said “some 
unlimited time.” I think it would more nearly fit the 
nursery business. 
METHODS OF OPPOSING UNFAIR LEGISLATION 
Payer read at the Nurserymen’s Convention, Detroit, 
Mich., June 25, 1915, by Curtis Y. Smith, Attorney, 
Boston, Mass. 
I N the comparatively short and recent period of four 
years, Congress and State Legislatures of the 
United States have enacted the almost incredible 
number of 65,000 laws. It hardly seems possible that 
human ingenuity could suggest so many different sub¬ 
jects for the attention and action of the law making 
branch of our national and state governments. It is a 
safe statement to make that no other country, compara¬ 
tively speaking, enacts such a large amount of laws. An 
(examination of the laws passed by the Parliament of 
(Great Britain in the four years 1912 to 1915 (the last 
was unknown to us, nor could we, in the short time 
allowed us, hunt up his credit. We wrote him that we 
would give him a limited credit. Then he sent in a list 
of stock for prices which were given him but the total 
amount not reckoned. Later he sent another list for 
prices, also ordering the first list we had quoted upon. 
After the shipment had gone and the bill was made 
out, greatly to our surprise we found it amounted to as 
much as $265. It was an instance where the whole 
transaction coming in the spring, when we were very 
much rushed the matter was acted upon hastily by us. 
But the damage did not end here. The fellow took our 
estimate to one of our good nursery friends in Rochester, 
spoke of us very familiarly, showed him the letter where 
we had agreed to give him credit, and on the strength of 
that letter alone, our Rochester friend also shipped him 
a good sized bill of goods on credit. 
Both of us are still waiting for our money, “sadder but 
wiser men.” 
Later we learned that the man had a record,—a party 
in New Jersey was trying to get him for raising a check, 
