FARM BUREAU: RELATION TO COUNTY AGENT 211 



dent. Few big new ideas have made themselves felt when 

 they were but one of several objects of the organizations 

 promoting them, a sort of "side show to the main tent." 

 A big idea, a new movement, in order to succeed must 

 usually have a definite organization to promote it. The 

 association together of persons who believe in and are co- 

 operating in a movement gives it a strength and an impetus 

 that can hardly be obtained in any other way. This has 

 been true in the case of the movement for prohibition, with 

 most big political questions, with the Red Cross, and with 

 innumerable private enterprises. 



For this reason, as well as others, the farm bureau move- 

 ment could not be a department or a bureau in a city 

 chamber of commerce. Nor would a bureau so organized 

 be likely to secure the sympathy or enlist the support of 

 farmers. They would as they did whether or not un- 

 justly, suspect the chambers of commerce of ulterior mo- 

 tives and of promoting their own interests through it. And 

 it followed that if farmers would not accept the work and 

 the management of city men, that they must not expect too 

 much from their pocketbooks. Farmer management implied 

 farmer financing. 



A question frequently raised is why some farmer organi- 

 zation already in existence could not have been used. Why 

 duplicate and multiply organizations ? 



Many satisfactory reasons are apparent to those who have 

 given the subject some thought. There were, in the first 

 place, no national farmers ' organizations in the sense that 

 they covered the whole country, and which were so organ- 

 ized that they could take over and promote this idea. Each 

 one was strong in one section and weak or wholly absent in 

 another and local situations had often arisen which had 

 made it practically impossible to change these conditions. 

 None of the big national farmers' organizations believed 



