waking hours to them, did
everything that seemed necessary that was suggested by my own
success, and yet I could not make it go, am glad I am clear of it,
and have no desire to try it again. I am perfectly willing to admit
my possible unfitness for the business, but I am also compelled to
admit that I could not succeed and that no advice of mine could help
others."

Although many, either under exceptional circumstances or because of
exceptional ability, have made a success of wholesale poultry
raising, it seems on reflection that Mr. Wolf's ideas are in the
main correct.

The price of chickens is fixed, like all other prices, by supply and
demand, and toward the supply every farmer contributes his chickens
and their eggs which cost him practically nothing; at least he
counts that they cost him nothing.

Now it is clear that if you considerably increase the supply at any
place, the price will fall, and the farmer, whose chickens and eggs
cost him almost nothing in money, will sell them low enough to
command a market and will continue to raise them, however little he
gets for them.

So you are against inexhaustible competitors who can neither be
driven out nor combined with. It is worse than competing with
bankrupt dealers. To make much money you must have at least some
monopoly, and even a little bit of the earth that is well suited to
your purpose where there is no unreasonable and unreasoning
competition, will give you a chance.

But while it is true that the farmer's subsidized hens have a very
disastrous effect at times upon the market, the fact is that,
notwithstanding the tariff, we import millions of dozens of eggs
laid each year by the pauper hens of Canada and often of Denmark.

Another fact to be considered is, that it is when eggs are most
plentiful that the farmers depress the market. With their ways of
handling their poultry, their hens lay only when conditions are most
favorable, and in the winter when eggs are as high as fifty cents a
dozen in cities, they have no eggs to market. Like the market
gardener, to be timely in market is to succeed. A week may mean an
annihilation of profits.

It is a different proposition to raise a few chickens as a side line
as the farmers do.

A workman at the Connecticut place of one of the experts who has
revised this book had a bit of land not more than 100 X 200 feet,
and for several years cleared $100 a year by raising eggs and
broilers, doing the work toget