IOWA DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE. 



started on this great subject of organization, without occupying too 

 much of your time this evening. 



The last speaker has given you some very good ideas of what you 

 are needing in the great state of Iowa; he has ahnost made a good 

 Grange speech, and he has pointed out the absolute necessity of 

 something being done to right the wrongs of which he has spoken. 

 The way we have been righting wrongs in the east, has been through 

 organization, through organized effort. 



You are here representing a great industry; you are doing a 

 great good among your people ; you are here for the purpose of pro- 

 tecting, as it were, j^our interests. You are an organization, local 

 in character, and you have done a great work; but suppose you had 

 been an organization national in character, such as has been referred 

 to by the gentleman who preceded me, as the Grange movement 

 25 or 30 years ago, in your state. I want to say to you, while the 

 Grange movement might be presumed to be a dead letter to-day, 

 for your own information, I want to say, that the Grange movement 

 is more alive to-day than it was ever in its history — they have pro- 

 duced results, accomplished things, in the past ten or fifteen years 

 that Avould have been impo'ssible to accomplish without this great 

 organization. 



I come to you, gentlemen, not as one who has been educated in 

 college, or prepared for any special line of work; I come to you as 

 a farmer of the state of New Jersey, who lives on and operates his 

 own farm. I come here as one who has had some little experience 

 in organizing the farmers of New Jersey, and in the state of Iowa, 

 where I have spent some time in the past year. 



It was a great pleasure to me to talk to the farmers of your 

 state, and the satisfaction of it all was, that I did not find a farmer 

 but who agreed with me. It is true that some of them could still 

 see the Grange skeleton ; their mistakes were f esh in the memory 

 of those who could recall some of those mistakes. I want to say to 

 you, the Grange of to-day is a conservative force. We are working 

 carefully to uplift the American farmer, whether in Iowa or the 

 eastern states. We are not antagonistic to any other industry ; we 

 are at work, fighting for a square deal; we are working for the 

 alleviation of the American farmer; and the past few years have 

 demonstrated that we had to have some organization in order to 

 control some of the conditions existing with which we are con- 

 fronted. We have been enabled in the state of New Jersey to do 

 things no one realized it was possible to do, in the way of securing 

 legislation which has been a great advantage to the farmers of our 

 state. Pardon me if I shall for the moment illustrate one practical 



