honest advice, would you not advise him to do that and lose your tenant?

Mr. Stickney-No sir. I will tell you why. One man who was with us five or six years, went out last week to buy a farm for himself. He came to me to ask what I thought about it. I learned the price that he was paying. I asked him how much he could pay down. He shrugged his shoulders a little and said: "Well, if I must, I can pay down $3,100." That surprised me by about $1,000. I thought he had about $2,000, but he has in the savings bank and at his command about $3,100.

Mr. Broughton - What interest does he get in the savings bank?

Mr. Stickney - I do not know.

Mr. Broughton-What security does he get?

Mr. Stickney - The banker's certificate of deposit, I sup

Mr. Ford-You are in a special business.

Mr. Stickney-I am running a pickle factory, but I am doing other work. This applies quite as much to our nursery as it does to my pickle business.

Mr. Ford-What nationality are your laborers?

Mr. Stickney-Nearly all Germans.

Mr. Ford-The conditions that prevail in your locality and in your style of farming are quite different from what most of us have to submit to. Labor in our locality has been very scarce, as I think every farmer will bear me out in saying, and has been made much more so by the opening of the Dakota lands. Every man that could has gone out there. The result has been that it has raised the price of labor so that farmers can hardly afford to get help. A man who has a family is more sure to go than a young man. It is easier to take a young man into his family than to do this way. That question has been discussed in the Country Gentleman a little. We cannot build houses for $135 that our laborers will live in, nor for less than $500. Then we have got to take our chances of getting an efficient man and hav

ing him change every year, and paying him his wages, so that I think the experience in this part of the state is that they will take their chances on getting young men or doing their own work.

Mr. Stickney-That is just the line of argument I have met from every one of my neighbors, and I have been almost burdensome to them for the last three years. I cannot answer it for any other locality in the state except by a man or two. How many comfortable tenant houses, comfortable in warmth and dryness and capability of being kept clean have you in your neighborhood standing vacant?

Mr. Ford-Quite a number. It is as fine a country as I know of, and I can point to a number of instances of houses that are vacant and stand vacant year after year till they rot down.

Mr. Hinton - Built for tenants?

Mr. Ford-I do not know as to that.

Mr. Stickney - That is the point. Build them as cheaply as they can be and then offer them to tenants for the lowest sum that will pay their rent and with an offer of extending to them constant labor that will enable them to live. If you have a tenant house in that condition it is a curiosity to me.

Mr. Ford These houses have perhaps been built by men who have lost their tenants, but the owners would be glad to have them occupied to keep their houses from deteriorating. Mr. Stickney - Do they offer them wages all the year round?

Mr. Ford Yes sir, and they all go to Dakota.

Mr. Stickney-Then I am sorry for you. That is all I know.

Mr. L. G. Kniffen, of Milwaukee - I want to say if the gentleman will go out to Dakota and start a farm and build a half a dozen tenant houses, and offer those very men who have gone out there a house and constant employment they will be glad to leave their homesteads except going home Sundays, to keep their claim, and come and work for him.

Mr. Elver, of Middleton, Dane Co. I have worked on that plan. I have lived in Dane county since 1852. I have had sometimes three tenant houses. I have one man who

has worked for me six years. I think the trouble is you give them employment when you need them, and when you do not need them you do not. Another thing is you act too high-toned towards them. If you will act towards them as they do towards you, you will find they are all right. I have had four or five boys and they have done part of the work. Mr. Broughton - What do your four or five boys do?

Mr. Elver-They have worked since they were able to, and gone to school. They have now left me. to attend to their own business. I never had any trouble with my tenants. Every one of them worked with me until he had accumulated a little property and then went and bought farms of their own. One is in Nebraska, and two are in Kansas. When they went away I asked them how much money they had and gave them my advice. Those men recommended others to come in their place. One man had a family. One man came there with his wife and worked five or six years and then had money enough to go on his own hook. By that time his brother came to me, and he stayed five or six years, and by that time a third came along, and they worked for me three or four or five years. They have all got farms now. The one who works for me now has been there five or six years. I asked him last fall, "Ain't you going to get your farm pretty soon?" He said, "No, I am doing pretty well this way; I do not want to do anything better than this; I am all right; I am provided for." He feels perfectly at home, and whenever I want him to work he works. I charge him a dollar a month for the house. He has a little garden with perhaps twenty or twenty-five fruit trees, half an acre. I let him have the garden and fruit in with it. If my children or family come around and want an apple they may have liberty to pick it. I told him half the fruit was mine, but half the time I do not get them. If there are not many I tell him to keep them, but I claim half the fruit so that he cannot shut me or the boys off the place.

Mr. Hinton I have lived in Milwaukee thirty odd years, and there is no man in Milwaukee who stands in so high estimation as the employer of labor as Mr. Stickney. He is talked of by Germans. They say, "He is the best man

what I ever worked for in my life." I know this: I am a pretty stout fellow, but I would not dare to go to his farm and take hold of him, even for fun; they would go for me. What he has said to-night I know to my own knowledge, and if you would take the trouble to go into the Historical . Society I could show it to you in print.

Mr. Stickney-I knew before coming before you that this paper would stir things up a little. It is not good orthodox doctrine. It is not the light you have been in the habit of looking at it in. I do not want to urge it at all. I believe if any of you should try it, money could not hire you to go back to the old way. I was forced into it. I started in life boarding from three to six men in my family until my wife's health was entirely worn out, and we were absolutely compelled by circumstances to take up the other system. Money never would hire us to go back. If you once try it you will never go back.

You

Mr. Ford-The circumstances under which the gentleman is placed are entirely exceptional. He is employing German help, and that help comes to this country and act as sensible men always will. They want to get experience, so they stop with a good farmer like himself, or sometimes in the city, because they like to be in cities or towns. They stay with him and are contented. But I tell you the young American is not content with that, and when these Germans have been in the country four or five years they will not stay there. Every young man that becomes imbued with American ideas has first among his aspirations the idea of self-independence, of establishing his own home and being his own man. cannot repress it, and you can offer him twice as much as he can make in bleak Minnesota or Dakota, and he will leave you and go there in spite of you. I appeal to every man who has had experience in the central part of the state, outside of the exceptional experience of the gentleman here, to confirm me in this. I know they will do it. I know that Gov. Taylor will, and I know that this gentleman from the southern part of the county will. The gentleman from Middleton comes from Germany, and some of his brother Germans have come and stayed with him till they got their experience. He says we lose men by being high-toned with

them. I do not know but that is a good thing. I do not know of any men that are more high-toned than the laboring men. You can support a young man in your house cheaper than you can build a house for him and support him there, and you are going to have a valuable class of men who are willing to make something of themselves, merely as temporary make-shifts. In England where there are recognized classes of men and where it is difficult to get hold of land, these men are willing to live with farmers and work for them all their lives. They will not do it here, and it is not necessary for them. The best answer to all this is that labor is so dear here that the farmer cannot afford to hire it.

Mr. Stickney - To those who think as Mr. Ford does, and there are very many, there remains but this one problem to solve: Our land is producing less than half its capacity simply because we lack this element of labor. The hard problem is how shall we get labor and profitably apply it to our land?

Mr. Elver - I think Mr. Ford is not authority because he has not employed this kind of labor, but I have. I would rather have a man living in the house to-day if I could have it, because if a young man lives with you you can call on him whenever you want to.

BEE KEEPING.

By DR. J. W. VANCE, Madison, Wisconsin.

Mr. President: I come among you not as farmer nor the son of a farmer. I know very little about ensilage, Southdown sheep, Jersey cattle or Berkshire hogs, yet I thank you for the privilege, as a representative of the Madison Beekeepers' Association, of speaking to you upon one important branch of rural industry, which we deem worthy of your attention, viz., beekeeping.

Although we dwell amid the narrow confines of the city with no contiguous clover fields, yet we have had large returns of honey from a small number of colonies. But the farmer, with broad acres capable of sustaining hundreds of