"Therefore, be it resolved, that we, the Northern Nut Growers' Association, suggest that the Secretary of Agriculture prohibit the shipment of chestnut nursery stock, except in the localities known to have the blight, and that with each permit for shipment shall go a bulletin or circular giving the important facts about the chestnut blight. The only exception to this regulation shall be the shipments for experimental purposes, and such shipments must have the above mentioned permit, and the name of the nursery from which such trees have come, and must be inspected by Federal inspectors." I assume, of course, that inspection is a general inspection. I don't mean each particular shipment. If there are any questions about that, why, I will let the chair answer them.
DR. ULMAN: Mr. Littlepage, I would like to ask a question, or, rather, offer a criticism. If I understand you rightly, you say, "except in the districts where blight is prevalent." As a matter of fact, sir, the particular nursery that advertises the chestnut tree works within a radius of possibly 250 miles of Rochester, in a district where there are many prospective horticulturists. One of the things that impressed me more than anything else in the report of the Secretary was the fact that we have lost a large number of members, and that we haven't attracted to ourselves many new members. So far as my personal experience goes, if I were to choose the one method of being most thoroughly disliked, it would be to ask my neighbors, particularly those who do not know me, to become members of any kind of a nut association. There is a glamour about planting, and it is a sort of a disease with some people, year after year, to seek for novelties. These nut tree advertisements that read so well attract many purchasers. Right here in this section people are buying nut trees that they are going to plant in a blighted district, and these people, when they see what utter failures they have, will be so disgusted with nut growing that when you approach them you cannot talk nuts to them, and you will never have them join the Association. More and more are leaving the Association, and very few new ones are coming in to take their places. So I think the resolution ought to be changed.
THE PRESIDENT: In what respect would you have it changed?
DR. ULMAN: To apply generally.
MR. LITTLEPAGE: Yes. Well, I agree very largely with what the doctor says. I have always felt that the success of this organization—the success of the nut industry as a whole—depended upon its being upon an entirely truthful, fair and honest basis. I would rather see a crooked cashier in a bank than a crooked nurseryman or tree man. The cashier you can check up at 4:30 every afternoon; you can't check up the crooked tree man for about ten years. I think the worst of all discouraging things to people who want to go to the country to build up farms and homes is to run into alluring, but misleading, advertisements. I have an abounding faith in tree culture. I think that the pecan tree, the black walnut, varieties of the English walnut and of a number of other nut trees, are going to make it most possible and more desirable for men to go to the country, but I think the success of those things depends upon giving those people, as far as possible, facts, and not misleading them. Wherever a man sets a tree that is a failure you have a man as a failure generally as a tree man, and wherever you get a man to set a tree that succeeds, you have a living, walking advocate of the tree business. This Association has been fortunate all along in its policies. It has always stood against the fraudulent promotions; it has always stood against fraudulent nursery stock; it has always stood against fraudulent representations, and I think, for that reason, that its future is reasonably safe, assuming that is its continued policy.
THE PRESIDENT: Do you accept Dr. Ulman's amendment?
MR. LITTLEPAGE: I accept it.
MR. JONES: As I understand the resolution, it applies to nurseries in the infected areas.
MR. LITTLEPAGE: Yes.
MR. JONES: I believe it is practically impossible to grow trees in an infected area without sending out the blight, but if a man is isolated, like Mr. Riehl, at Alton, Illinois, he can grow trees without danger of sending out the blight.