INSTITUTE PAPERS. 83 



cape. There are probably a hundred tombstones marking the 

 death of cooperative enterprises to one monument to their suc- 

 cess. In this country their mortahty has been especially com- 

 plete, yet I am glad to say of late not wholly so. The grange, 

 organized with cooperation prominent in its purposes, has 

 mourned the loss of thousands of efforts. Other organizations 

 that have run into the hundreds of thousands of members, and 

 one or more into the millions, for the purpose of joint effort, 

 have gone to rest. The Wheel, the Alliance, the Sons of Equity, 

 and several other gi'eat western farm organizations, some of 

 which I knew of personally, are among them. Grange and other 

 stores have risen in the East, but mostly to disappear. A few 

 are living, notably the one at Houlton, and apparently success- 

 fully. Each New England state has tried by its granges to do 

 exchange business for their orders. The eff'ort was early made 

 and failed. Recently it has been tried again in four of these 

 New England states but not successfully. 



In Europe there are 90,000 co-operative organizations, cover- 

 ing most fields of endeavor and all phases of farm affairs. It 

 appears from the volume of information at my command that 

 co-operation after many failures is now safely on the road to 

 success there. Their review would be tedious. Sufficient will 

 be one illustration. In butter, eggs and pork products the Dan- 

 ish farm co-operators sell over $17,000,000 dollars worth to one 

 cooperative purchasing organization in England. This English 

 purchasing agency deals in the hundreds of millions annually. 

 Though it began with some dozen weavers, it has grown to two 

 and one-half millions in membership. Failure in this country 

 has been due to our larger farms, to the independence of the 

 American farmer, suspicion of others and the feeling of ade- 

 quacy to handle his own aff'airs. The recent world-wide agita- 

 tion of the cost of living, especially as related to farm products, 

 has brought out into clear relief the fact that it is not the 

 farmer that creates these costs but the exchanger. The 35 per 

 cent only of the consumer's dollar that reaches the farmer's 

 pocket has set our farmers to thinking and is moving them to 

 action. Before this period, however, the exactions of the rail- 

 roads and of the middlemen had driven the citrus fruit grow- 

 ers of California to successful cooperative exchange. The same 

 fact has acted likewise in fruit growing sections of Oregon and 



