It is natural for the rich men who put their money so gleefully into this publishing enterprise, at the instigation of Mr. Brodhead, to try to get some of it back before the final smash, which is evidently not far removed, and hence the ignorant and blundering emasculation of the Year Book, in order to reduce its cost. “The Great Table,” as it was called for years, embraces all others, and all others are merely subsidiary to that. This table should be restored in its entirety, for it is worth the whole of them and double as many more. With every other table thrown out and this one restored, complete, the breeders would be content. The Year Book—the great instructor of the past—I have just learned is no longer published for the breeders or for the press, but for the tracks. The operation is explained as follows: Every year the secretaries of the National and the American Trotting Associations send out by express a lot of blank books, blanks, etc., to each track in good standing and in this outfit for the year is a copy of the Year Book, which is charged at the long price. The tables of fastest records, I am told, are quite carefully made in the offices of these associations themselves, and the book is thus made a convenience for the tracks. Thus, by this system of forced loans on the tracks, the Year Book is kept alive. This method of financing the company will not last long.
A different method has been adopted in order to secure funds from registration. Money for registration must come from the breeders themselves directly, and there is no way of forcing them to put up through the manipulation of intermediary officials. Hence the plan has been tried of scaring them into it, but with what success I am not informed. At the annual meeting in April, 1895, I think it was, a committee was appointed, consisting of Messrs. Brodhead and Boyle, if I remember, to consider and report to the next meeting amendments to the standard advancing the requirements for registration, and everybody was advised to hurry in their pedigrees or they might be excluded. At the meeting in 1896 the committee did not report, but Mr. Brodhead reported in a series of resolutions, in which the number of standard dams was advanced, which suited Woodburn exactly, but there was no advance in the time to be made, and the tin-cup record against time was carefully protected. The resolutions were adopted unanimously, and went before the breeding public as the new advanced standard that would be decided at the next annual meeting. From time to time the breeders were duly informed of the proposed advance and cautioned many times to get in while they could. The annual meeting in April, 1897, came, and instead of a rush of breeders interested one way or another in the proposed advance, the same stereotyped half a dozen men were there who had been manipulating the scare for two years, and not one of them, even Brodhead himself, voted for the advance. This is no advance at all, in a practical sense, and would accomplish nothing, and would do no good to anybody except Woodburn or some other establishment that like her has been breeding trotters for forty years. It was merely intended for a scare, and it failed under such circumstances as to fully disclose the object in placing it before the breeders. The scare is all out of this kind of humbug and deception, and now what? When the standard was adopted on the basis of 2:30 that rate of speed was sixteen seconds behind the fastest record then made. To-day if the standard were placed at 2:20 it would be about sixteen seconds slower than the fastest time now on record. But this real advance, which is imperatively demanded by all the considerations of philosophy and progress, will never be made so long as the standard is under the control of Woodburn. The reason for this is made obvious by reference to page 504, etc. Mr. Brodhead’s ambition has been fully gratified, he is in full and absolute control of the registration of the country, he has completely demonstrated his incompetency for such a position, and he has the satisfaction of knowing, if it be a satisfaction, that no sensible business man on the face of the globe would be willing to pay ten per cent. of the cost for the property he now controls. And who will say this is not a righteous retribution for the disreputable means employed, first and last, to obtain this control?
My life-work in building up a breed of trotting horses and thereby adding many millions to the value of the horse stock of the country had been more effective than I had even hoped for. I knew that I had laid the foundation on the bed-rock of truth, and I knew that the superstructure had been honestly erected, but I did not know what a deep root my teachings had taken in the minds of all intelligent and thinking men. In transferring the property the chief source of my unhappiness was in the thought that heaven and earth would be moved to destroy what I had done and overthrow what I had taught. But I had builded wiser and stronger than I knew, and when the “feather-weights” were hired to pull the house down and tear up the very roots of the seed I had planted, the people would not listen to them and nobody would read their vapid utterances. And thus the effort ended in the death of the Monthly. The harvest of thought was much nearer the reaping time when the transfer was made than I had supposed, and since then it has been ripening and ripening, and to-day if any man were heard advocating more running blood in the trotter, he would with very great unanimity be pronounced either an ignoramus or a fool, on that question at least.
But, much as I disliked to surrender my life-work to a man whose moral fiber I had tested and found brittle, the transfer was really “a blessing in disguise.” It gave me rest, it gave me health, and it gave me leisure to prosecute the study of the horse of history in fields hitherto untrodden. The years thus employed in digging after the very roots of history in the libraries, at home and abroad, have glided by, affording a continuous enjoyment in the discovery of many things that are very old and yet entirely new to this generation. Very often, when the work went slowly, I thought I could again hear the quiet, sympathetic voice of a Pennsylvania Friend gently prompting me with the remark, “Thee should remember that thee is no longer a young man.” And now that my long-promised and pleasant undertaking is completed, it is my very earnest wish that the thousand friends who have been waiting for it may enjoy the pleasant surprises it will furnish them as much as I have enjoyed their exhumation from the archives of long-buried centuries.
APPENDIX
HISTORY OF THE WALLACE PUBLICATIONS.
BY A FRIEND OF THE AUTHOR.
Mr. Wallace’s early life and education—Removal to Iowa, 1845—Secretary Iowa State Board of Agriculture—Begins work, 1856, on “Wallace’s American Stud Book,” published 1867—Method of gathering pedigrees—Trotting Supplement—Abandons Stud Book, 1870, and devotes exclusive attention to trotting literature—“American Trotting Register,” Vol. I., published in 1871—Vol. II. follows in 1874—The valuable essay on breeding the forerunner of present ideas—Standard adopted 1879—Its history—Battles for control of the “Register”—Wallace’s Monthly founded 1875—Its character, purposes, history, writers, and artists—“Wallace’s Year Book” founded 1885—Great popularity and value—Transfer of the Wallace publications, and their degeneration.
The history of the series of works known as the Wallace publications, even in the brief form here contemplated, involves in a large degree the biography of Mr. Wallace. It is indeed more than the sketch of a long and indefatigably industrious life-work. It involves as well, in the forty years of creative labor, the development of a great productive industry, and of a distinct branch of literature. Mr. Wallace’s labors in the field of gathering and systematizing American horse history began at a day when there was no breed of trotters, or no trotting literature. When he laid aside active work there were both, well established and clearly defined factors in the nation’s progress, and in all the years from the commencement he was the central figure in the work of establishing a breed of trotters, and incomparably the clearest and strongest force in the direction and upbuilding of a trotting literature. That is the simple truth of history, which the verdict of time will render it puerile to deny.