chant looks askance at any scheme to put the farmers on more of a cash basis. It is by means of this egg-trading business that he insures himself against the competition of catalogue houses. He extends credit when hens are not laying well and gets even when the egg season is on, or when the farmer pays the balance from the cash returns of his monthly milkcheck.

The business done with banks is limited pretty largely to loans on real Farm machinery is usually bought for cash, or credit is granted by the firm making the sale. It is said that three months' time is usually given at the same price as a strictly cash sale. Keen farmers are known to have received a five-dollar discount on a sixty-dollar plow for spot cash. Thus it may be inferred that the on-time buyers are paying a pretty high rate of interest in many instances. To practically all the farmers the credit situation was satisfactory. The prevailing rate at the bank is six per cent for a long-time loan with a good first-mortgage security. Short-time loans are seldom demanded, only a few isolated cases being noted and then money was hired for three or four months at eight per cent. It seemed that not one farmer had ever heard of the new Agricultural Credit agitation. They did not see any need for any more credit. Only three farmers seemed to be free from the notion generally held that the use of credit by a farmer in his farming business is something to be avoided, something to be gotten rid of as soon as conditions will permit.

Only a few women had ever availed themselves of a day's trip to the Twin Cities to do any shopping. In sixteen per cent of the places, the wife or husband had done the buying of clothes or other supplies either at State Fair time, or some other occasion.

It is difficult to generalize about the farmer's attitude toward the world of business in general. There are a number of farmers in every community who have a practical insight into affairs and who understand markets and business in general quite as well as any other well-informed business man. Indeed, it seems that with the spread of daily newspapers, whose market quotations are being studied more and more by the young generation, the views held by the majority of the farmers of to-day will be supplanted by a clearer comprehension in the next generation.

To-day, with many farmers "prices are what they are simply because town men won't pay more." To these farmers there is but little meaning in an attempted explanation of how world-wide crop conditions are weighed against an estimated demand in order to facilitate marketing at steady world prices. Others, while they have the idea that crop conditions elsewhere contribute towards a fixing of prices, do not understand that one or two localities alone have but little influence on such a staple as wheat. One farmer in boasting of how shrewd he was last year to hit the highest price on wheat, very generously admitted that he "had gotten some inside.

information from a brother-in-law in California." That fellow wrote that "the crop was poor out there, too." Putting these two personal observations together, he felt that he had a good line on what the price would be.

The typical farmer's notion of marketing is that here is a world in which one man's gain is another man's loss, where sharp wits, unscrupulous representations, and masked thievery reign supreme. As long as he is selling locally, and the thing he is selling is used or consumed in the community where it is sold he feels sure of himself, confident of his own. shrewdness, and his ability to hold his own with the man he knows. He readily sees for example how the local butcher must needs sell for more than he pays in order to make his living and provide for his family. In deals of this kind, where the buyer is known to him personally and where the thing sold will be used locally, he will indeed bargain and haggle to his best ability, but he never gives his word or hand on a bargain of which it can be shown that he stooped to dishonesty. When it comes to selling in a wider market, however, if, for example, a carload of supposedly highgraded milch cows are being bought to be shipped out of town, or a horse is bought for a distant party, then his business ethics is strained and stretched in direct proportion to the scope of the market. In such dealings the old saw seems to be twisted into something as follows: "Be honest as long as it is the best policy." Such matters as selling veal only a few days old, when the law requires it to be six weeks old, and dumping in a poorer grade of grain than the sample on which the contract was based, readily suggest themselves as a few of the common practices in regard to this matter of "uncommon honesty." It is not to be inferred from this that the farmer has become morally degenerate and unscrupulous beyond other business men. Not at all. At least a partial explanation for this ethics is found in the fact that in face of a world market, with the various agencies and machinery of distribution between him and the ultimate consumer, he loses that sense of personal responsibility which he feels in dealing directly with the consumer. The workings of boards of trade, and chambers of commerce, and the function of deals in futures, are all an utter mystery to him. Somehow he feels that he is completely at the mercy of some power, some system, which controls this market. Why should he feel compunctions about some little misrepresentations, when, as he puts it, "that is the way of the business world"?

FARMERS' ORGANIZATIONS

In the preceding chapters we noted the prevalence of the opinion that through the machinations of some system the conditions of the market and of the business world in general are against the farmer. "A man with

all his family may toil the whole year around, digging and scraping together as much as he can, and then when he gets ready to sell what he has, he must take whatever is offered him, even if that is less than what it cost him to produce the thing." It is felt that "this is not just," and yet "a man would be a fool to hold out against these conditions; everything is against the farmer." This conviction has led a few to keep out of the

market as much as possible, to "produce as much as they can of the things they need for their family and sell and buy only those things they can not make themselves." Thus only, it is held, can they well prevent any one from taking the fruits of their labor. "The only thing a farmer can do is to scratch and save.".

That such a method of meeting the adverse conditions of the business world is not general, however, is evinced by the growth and spread of farmers' organizations. These represent the various ways in which farmers have banded together to get "what could not be gotten single-handed." "In protection and furtherance of our own interest, we were led to do it." The Organization Map gives a graphic representation of the distribution of shares in all the farmers' stock companies, as well as membership in mutual insurance societies, and social and religious organizations of all kinds. In this chapter we will confine our consideration to the economic organizations only. To facilitate recognition of these on the map, all have been designated by some character founded on a circle. The following table gives the distribution of membership for certain organizations among land proprietors as compared with renters.

The lower percentage of membership among renters is explained by the fact that their tenancy is not secure. They "do not know how long they may stay in the neighborhood"; hence, they "do not care to tie themselves. up in anything which may prove expensive, and whose benefits they may get without being members."

There is but one member of the American Society of Equity, at least only one man seemed to remember belonging to it. Nor was there any evidence of Grange activity or membership in the township. "There used to be, but it has all died out."

The membership in farmers' elevators in this township is divided between the one at N. and the one at D. Both of these elevators are in reality farmers' stock companies although they are called coöperative companies. The dividends are divided among the stockholders only, and membership is not limited to farmers. Both companies have been operating very successfully and it is generally admitted that since their organization farmers have been getting more nearly the prices that central-market quotations would warrant, than they used to with only the line elevators in town. Yet objection is made by some that even the farmers' elevators are run

on too much of a money-making basis. Dividends range from ten to twenty per cent annually. The shareholders and directors maintained that they were doing most for the cause of farmers' coöperation by making the business pay well for those who had put their money into it. "In that way those who are always mistrustful and holding back will be more apt to back another farmers' movement when one is started."

There are three mutual farmers' insurance associations which have membership in this township. They insure against losses by fire and lightning only. A glance at the foregoing percentages and the Organization Map will show that there are many tenant farms which have no membership in an insurance company. This simply means that the tenant does not have any insurance in a mutual company. The owner of tenant farms usually does have. Thus the membership in these organizations is larger than our figures indicate.

Insurance 49%

Creamery 28%

Elevator 24%

Diagram showing membership in leading farmers' organizations.

These mutual insurance associations are all doing well; not a single farmer in the township, however much he declaimed against coöperation in general, had a word against mutual insurance as carried on by the farmers. One of the members of the Walcott Farmers' Mutual Insurance Company produced figures showing that the association had saved its members the sum of forty-seven thousand dollars during the seventeen years that it has been organized; i. e., if its members had carried a like amount of insurance with one of the old line companies, the premiums would have amounted to forty-seven thousand dollars more than the fees and assessments did with their own company. Members of another township mutual insurance company boast of the proud record of not a single assessment since they were organized over ten years ago. A director of one of these companies gave as his opinion that the reason insurance is so successfully handled by the farmers themselves is because "the whole thing is a matter of playing safe, there is no chance for any profit-making graft to enter into a thing of this kind, the way we are organized." As a result there are chosen as directors men who really consider it an honor to serve the association as directors; "there is no underhand work of any kind possible."

It seems that the Farmers' Telephone Company was organized in order to get for a large number of farmers who were scattered here and there,