The second volume of the “Year Book,” 330 pages, contained in addition to the same class of matter as its predecessor, tables of sires and dams, great brood mares, and fastest records. Still further improvements were made in every year. Volume VI., published for 1890, was a handsomely bound book of 642 pages, with summaries of all races in which heats were trotted or paced in 2:40 or better, list of best records slower than 2:40, complete 2:30 lists with extended pedigrees, the Great Table with the pedigrees of the sires extended, list of 2:20 trotters according to records, list of 2:20 trotters under their sires, list of great brood mares, sires of dams, mares the dams of producing sons or daughters, tables of fastest records, champion trotters from 1845 to 1890, champions at all ages from yearlings to five-year-olds, champion stallions, table of 2:20 pacers, and of 2:30 pacers under sires. No such comprehensive and valuable mass of statistics was ever arranged, and this volume was in itself a perfect encyclopedia of trotting literature.
No eulogy of the “Year Book” is necessary, for every farmer’s boy knew before it was three years old that it was indispensable to all horsemen. It instantly bounded into a place of authority, and to thousands who felt the “Register” out of reach it was at once “Stud Book” and “Racing Calendar,” and none of Mr. Wallace’s creations performed a wider public service, or attained a popularity so broadcast and sudden. The new work was peculiarly fortunate in having back of it the authority of the “Register,” and the prestige of a name that had already become world-wide as rendering everything it bore authoritative—but even allowing for these advantages the quick popular indorsement of the “Year Book” was an eloquent testimony to the wisdom of its plan.
Conclusion.
The Wallace Trotting Register Company, with a capital of $100,000, was organized in 1889, and October 1, of that year, all the publications became the property of this company. The last chapter of this book details the final transfer to the American Trotting Register Association in 1891.
With the fortunes of the Wallace publications since that transfer it may be, perhaps, questioned whether this sketch has anything to do, and yet it would seem incomplete without the sequel. As already stated, Wallace’s Monthly degenerated to nothing and died. The “Year Book” has been emasculated until it is but a shadow, incomplete and unsatisfactory, of what it was, and is notoriously published at a loss. Its once great tables are cut from their complete state to be merely the tables of a single year, and where one complete “Year Book” was in the Wallace régime the only hand-book necessary, now the student must rummage through half a dozen, more or less, to ascertain the simplest series of facts. The standard has been mismanaged, revisions have been made and rescinded, and no advance has been made in the speed qualifications, though 2:20 trotters are as common to-day as 2:30 trotters were in 1891. In consequence, registration has fallen away, and from being a good purchase at $130,000 in 1891, the “Register” properties to-day are rated so dubiously far below par as to make the expression of their value in figures hardly possible. That a period of “hard times” came shortly after the purchase of the “Register” is true—but the practical wrecking of the Wallace publications cannot be accounted for solely on the theory of business depression.
Such in brief outline has been the story of the founding of these works, which in their own upbuilding helped incalculably to upbuild one of the nation’s great industries. The present works may be destroyed or pass away, but the true Wallace works cannot. Mr. Wallace’s works have a place in horse history, secure, unique, alone. Created, we might say from nothing, they each and all grew and prospered in his care and guidance, and became powers for good and auxiliaries of industry. If he is a benefactor who causes two blades of grass to grow where one grew before, how much the more is he whose labor and genius have enriched ten thousand farms, and been the most potent single influence in developing a productive industry the extent of which can only be estimated in millions. Mr. Wallace’s works will live after him. In speaking once on the transient nature of fame, a distinguished lawyer, a man of national reputation, said: “After I am gone I will be remembered as a successful lawyer among many other successful lawyers, but Mr. Wallace’s name will live as long as a horse exists on the earth.” We rarely judge contemporaries justly. It needs the softening perspective of time in which to lose the dimming prejudices of the present; and however much these works may be appreciated to-day, their true worth, what they accomplished, and the productive genius, purposeful industry, and plain, consistent honesty from which they were evolved will only be clearly seen and fully conceded by the historian of the future.