TENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART iV 1U7 



.most successfully. It is a splendid system of co-operation in selling. 

 Those citrus fruit fellows send a car load of oranges to New York, and 

 when it gets to Kansas City or St. Louis if they find out by a telegram 

 from their New York man that New York is full, and they can market 

 the car in Des Moines, they will switch it (so with any other place), 

 and thus feed it to the market. 



Then accidentally at Denver we ran across another sample. Some 

 old farmer out there some years ago, when wheat was only worth 28 

 cents a bushel, conceived the idea of grinding their wheat. So he built 

 a mill, got his neighbors into it by agreeing to market the wheat grown 

 in that irrigated country, and without attempting to fix the price, sell it 

 at such a price as would keep Kansas flour out, and it has become a 

 tremendous business, with two or three mills. . I think one of them has 

 a capital of about a million dollars. There is a splendid system of co- 

 operaton — not fixing prices, but having uniform quality and then con- 

 trolling the market. 



Now I want to say to you that we found many cases of attempts ai 

 co-operation. Many of them were failures through lack of business 

 management, and also through the lack of confidence in co-operation 

 among themselves. There was a fear that some other fellow was getting 

 the better of them. They didn't have the capacity of holding together; 

 in other words, they didn't have enough intelligence, because co-operation 

 is only possible among people of high intelligence and men who have 

 confidence in each other; and then it is possible only when carried out 

 on business lines. 



Sir Horace Plunkett, as you know, was here and spent a week witn 

 us. He has organized through his association a thousand co-operative 

 organizations in Ireland covering different things, from what we call 

 grain stores, such as we have in some parts of this state, buying farm- 

 ers' supplies at wholesale, to banks, among the poorest of the poor, 

 where the individual has not a cent's worth of credit on the face of the 

 earth. And yet they are taking the best of those poorest of the poor 

 and getting them together, the government is lending them money to be- 

 gin with, — $50 or $100 — and that is given out only for productive' purposes, 

 and then it must be recommended by a committee who believe that that 

 productive purpose is a wise one; and they have built up 140 banks. 

 I mention this to show you the extent to which co-operation is possible. 

 We don't need it here, because we are not the poorest of the poor, and 

 we are not as poor as those fellows over there are, but I want to show 

 you the way in which co-operation can be carried out. 



Now, when we come down to conditions, we found them better in 

 these central western states — Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minne- 

 sota, Wisconsin and Illinois — better than in any other part of the Union, 

 New England not excepted; and yet we found that there was bad sani- 

 tation in those country places; there was typhoid fever when there ought 

 not to have been, because of wells; there was consumption where there 

 ought not to have been, because people didn't understand how to ventilate 

 their houses; and, splendid as the condition is compared with other parts 

 of the country, it is very far below what it should be. 



