DRAG OF THE HARROWS 245 



That is the Farmer's motive for taking action. He 

 wants to improve his scale of living for the sake of his 

 family. By making the farm home a place of comfort 

 his sons and daughters will be more content to remain 

 on the land. He does not seek to hoard money; he 

 intends to spend it. If middlemen are crowded out of 

 his community it will be because there are too many of 

 them. Instead of having to support parasites the com- 

 munity will be just that much more prosperous, the 

 farms just that much better equipped, the land just 

 that much more productive and thereby the country's 

 wealth just that much greater. 



That is how it appears to the Farmer. 



" If the Farmer is to be a merchant, a wholesaler, a 

 banker and all the rest of it he is no longer a farmer. 

 Is nobody else to have a right to live?" enquires the 

 Cynic. " Did these Grain Growers fight the elevator 

 combine of the early days in order that they could 

 establish a Farmers' Combine? Is one any better than 

 the other?" 



The inference is that the Grain Growers are bluffing 

 deliberately and aiming at all the abuses conjured by 

 the word, " combine." The slander is self-evident to 

 anyone who examines the constitution of the Farmers' 

 Movement, so framed from the first that any possibility 

 of clique control was removed for all time. It is 

 impossible to have a " combine " of fifty thousand units 

 and maintain the necessary appeal to the cupidity of 

 the individual. It is not possible for designing leaders, 

 if such there were, to take even the first step in manipu- 

 lation without discovery. It simply cannot be done. 

 Woe betide the man who even exhibited such tendencies 

 among his fellow Grain Growers! These organized 

 farmers have learned how to do their own thinking and 



