152 THE GROUNDSWELL. 



in business. Our legislative bodies, and even the Senate of 

 the United States, hold executive sessions with closed doors. 

 While it might be freely confessed that a political organi 

 zation, conducted with secrecy, would be likely to prove 

 inimical to the liberties of the people, there can be no danger 

 from the secrecy obligatory on the Patrons of Husbandry, 

 one of whose fundamental principles is that politics shall not 

 be discussed in meetings of the Order. Certainly, one thing 

 has been proved, that women, from whom secrets were 

 wrongfully supposed to leak as freely as water from a sieve, 

 have proved themselves as trustworthy in this particular as 

 men, thus disproving one more of the slanders against 

 the sex. 



THE SECRET FEATURE EXAGGERATED AND MIS 

 APPREHENDED. 



From first to last, there has been the wildest misappre 

 hension of the extent and importance of the secrecy specialty 

 of the Granges. This feature has been grossly misrepresented. 

 Good people, in their anxiety to discountenance any thing 

 savoring of Know-Nothingism or the like, have held up 

 their hands in horror when asked to join. &quot;What? Join 

 a secret society? Never! Never/!&quot; Straightway, they 

 have gone home, and, with hair on end, outpoured to the 

 partners of their bosom the unheard-of wickedness they have 

 been tempted to perpetrate. 



There exists, among persons who are not members and are 

 therefore unacquainted with its workings, a fixed impression 

 that the Order of Patrons of Husbandry is modeled after 

 the German Vehm Gericht a sort of agricultural &quot;Holy 

 League ; &quot; that it holds midnight sessions to which no one is 

 admitted, except after giving certain cabalistic grips and 

 passwords ; that its councils are presided over by mysterious, 



