Others have sold and
continue to sell trees to peddlers without limit, for cash, and of any
and all varieties called for, while they denounced the system of
peddling in unmeasured terms. Now it is just as possible for a tree
peddler to be an honest man as it is for the man who grows trees to sell
to be honest. I do not say that all men belonging to either class are
honest. It would be equally absurd to say that all of either class are
dishonest. I despise the quack, the liar, the deceiver in any business,
and I have no respect or love for the man who will sell worthless
varieties of trees or wrongly named varieties, knowingly. Honesty here
as elsewhere is the best policy. But here is a fact, as I believe: It is
better to plant an inferior tree than none at all, and I know of
neighbors who would go down into their graves without ever planting a
tree if some persuasive peddler had not talked it into them to do so,
and these same neighbors now have quite respectable orchards. Here is
another fact: One half the orders sent to nursery-men by farmers during
the past twenty years have called for varieties utterly worthless for
the localities in which they were to be planted.
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