Seventy-Third Annual Repoet 1247 



sarj to take steps which seem of such tremendous magnitude in 

 order to reach it. Now is the time to discuss the question. I 

 should like to hear the objections. Let us thresh this question out. 

 Perhaps information can be given as to exact conditions, if mem- 

 bers will raise objections to the report of the committee. I must 

 say that while I have studied the question of cooperation and 

 looked at it as a question that we might solve in country districts, 

 when I came to go deeper into the question and learn the condi- 

 tions as to the consumer, I came to the conclusion that I had never 

 dreamed of so large a proposition. It is not a question we can take 

 up by local organization and ever arrive at any definite result. 



Mk. Sciikiver: Conditions are such that something must be 

 done to bring about this cooperation. Let me give an illustration to 

 show the necessity for action. In our place we use a great deal of 

 feed and there are three feed establishments in the place. One of 

 them is the grange; the others are retail dealers. Our grange 

 store does a business of from $125,000 to $150,000 a year. Per- 

 haps the other places do a business nearly equal to it. But there is 

 this difficulty in our grange business. We cannot buy feeds from 

 the agent that sells to the retail dealer. The retail dealers have an 

 organization; they held a meeting last week in Middletown, in 

 which they refused to buy feeds from the mills or firms that sold 

 to the grange. Last summer our grange agent bought a carload 

 of cement from an agent and it was duly and properly delivered. 

 He had been in the habit of supplying the local dealers in different 

 places in the county with cement. He went over to Florida and 

 approached the man who dealt in the business there and he said : 

 " You sold a carload of cement to the grange in Chester, did you 

 not?" "Yes." "Well, there is the door; you can go out of it 

 and you need never come here again." He told me that he 

 lost the sale of 32 carloads of cement because he sold a carload to 

 the grange people. 



That is pretty ugly business, and you have to treat it in a 

 rather vigorous and ugly manner. We have to do something. Who 

 are the people that use the feed, pay for it ? Has it come to pass 

 that the people who consume the feed can have nothing to do with 

 the sale of it ? Is it so that the mills and the wholesale dealers can 

 rule against the people who consume the feed ? Is that honest, 



