The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1888-03-28

drink from the pans. Such practices,
as we honestly believe, work a positive
injury to dairying. For this reason we
pictured them as powerfully as we
could, just as we propose, next month,
to picture the evils and oily of the sys-
tenn of working out the road tax" as
employed in many districts. The dairy
man who secures the top price for his
butter gets it because his dairy opera
tons are a constant guarantee against
such scene as we pictured The OBJ
ject of the Creamery Special was to
show the advantages and disadvan-
tages of the creamery. The Rural does
not appear as a special pleader for the
creamery, as many papers do. The
general conclusion our articles left in
the minds of most of those who have
written us was that the dairyman who
has skill and enterprise enough to work
up line of customers of his own
would lose money by going into a
creamery. Beyond bringing this fact
out, we did not deem it necessary to
picture the advantages of the model
dairy. Every good dairyman that we
have ever talked with tells the same
story about the methods employed in
securing superior market for his but
ter, and almost without exception
they have said that the dairy industry
is injured by careless and absolutely
dirty butter-makers. There are many
who believe that the Objectionable fea-
lures of country life should never be
brought prominently into view. 1t
may be better policy" to continually
pat the farmer on the back and ascribe
all his misfortunes to causes outside of
himself. Judging from our own per-
sonal experience, keen and honest criti-
cism, distasteful though it may have
been, has done us far more good than
any equal amount of fulsome praise.
We know plenty "small farmers who
are neat and clean enough in their dairy
operations to smile at the thought of
being insulted by such picture. In
the same way there are thousands of
farmers, and" small Zones at that, who
are capable of dressing with neatness
enough to enable them to laugh at the
thought of being libeled by the figure
in the country store. The object of
these pictures was to show the two eX-
tremes of dairying or what the same
milk might be made to do under differ
ent handling. Some years ago papers
in this city showed up the horrors of
the swill-milk business as conducted
here. Why should not our friend be
justified in saying that these dreadful
pictures were an insult to every small
milkman if he thinks our picture of the
worst possible type of butter-making is
an insult to every small farmer? The
Rural NeU- Yorker will not inten-
tionally insult any one. Whenever it
sees an evil it proposes to strike as
hard as it can. 1t believes that there
are many dairy practices that are inju-
rious and profitless, and it wants to see
them abolished.
The above, from the Rural NeD-
Yorker, pertains to a cartoon pub
lished in that paper. All we have to
add, in view of the editors remarks, is
that we still think the cartoon unfair,
in that the pictures do not fairly repre-
sent the two classes. They give no hint
of any possibility of good individual
dairy or of poor creamery, and both
are possible and probably exist. We
do not believe in "patting the farmer
on the back" or in indiscriminating
condemnation. What we do believe in
is the plain truth, and we have no par
ticular fault to find with the RurarS
articles to which he refers; it was the
cartoon, and as a comparative repre-
sentation of dairy and creamery meth
DDS it was conspicuously unjust.