VERMONT DAIRYMEN S ASSOCIATION. 99 



no such ability shown in farming- as was done there forty 

 years ago. What has caused this deterioration? It is the 

 lack of that intelligent judgment which belongs or should 

 belong to the farmer. The creamery can promote that and if 

 the man who runs the creamery is a statesman and a good 

 politician, if he is a broad minded man and can take hold of 

 that community, the influence of that creamery upon the com- 

 munity in the promotion of knowledge and gfood fortune will 

 be astonishing. My good friends, I have seen it worked out, 

 I have done what I could to work it out in my own business. 

 I have seen hundreds of creameries in this country where the 

 patrons are examples of the remarkable influence of such de- 

 termination. Therefore I say a creamery can be an almoner 

 of good to every community if it will. 



Now that report I told you about was a faithful exhibit 

 every year of just exactly what these men have done. Start 

 a man at ten cows that give 8000 pounds of milk apiece. He 

 brings to the creamery 80,000 pounds of milk in a year. His 

 neighbor looks the report over and says, "Well, I don't any- 

 where near come up to that, something is wrong," one man 

 begins to look at the work of another, and the influence of 

 these comparisons, one upon another, is strengthening in its 

 effect. 



Now the creamery can do other things; it can aid mutual 

 cooperation. It is so hard to get the average farmers to trust 

 one another. Prof. Hills struck the key note this morning. 

 What does a trust mean? What do the great trusts mean? 

 Just think of it. Men put their capital together, enough to 

 buy up cables and countries and trust one another implicitly, 

 while farmers with only $5,000 at stake distrust one another. 

 Great capitalists form a trust in mutual defense against the 

 world. You can learn a lot about this trust business, you can 

 learn a lot about what it means; if you do not look upon it 

 with suspicion you can see it is a force. These great trusts 

 will be all right if they are conscientiously conducted, and 

 the great lesson to be learned from the trusts is trust. If the 

 farmers in every community would cooperate together and 

 consider these questions what a great work they could do to- 

 gether. I have been trying- to have the farmers cooperate in 

 buying their feed together. I said, "Why can't you put your 

 money in a pool and buy your bran?" You can start with 

 the butter maker at the creamery. He can say, "bring in 

 your money if you want a car load of bran we will order it," 

 and finally we have got them in; now they cooperate don't 

 they? By and by there is machinery to be bought and they 

 ask "Why can't we make a pool and buy this machinery?" 

 We go to an agricultural machine agent and say, "We want so 



