226 THE THIRD POWER 



only mutual insurance companies and cooperative stores sur- 

 vived the wreck of 1879, and their only result is, at present, 

 a very large mail order house, known as the "Original Grange 

 Supply House." This kind, or rather phase of agricultural 

 cooperation, entirely eliminating middlemen of all sorts and 

 descriptions from the dealings of the farmer with the pro- 

 ducers of other products, reduces the prices of all the articles 

 wanted by himself and members of his family, to a certain 

 extent and in this way increases purchasing capacity of his 

 miserable income. Thus can be said of this phase of coopera- 

 tion in agricultural industry, that it indirectly increases the 

 income of the farmer. Nevertheless, as long as prices on his 

 own products are fixed in the most arbitrary, oppressive and 

 highway robbery manner by the forces and factors of exploita- 

 tion, concentrated exclusively on distributive side of the in- 

 dustry, such an indirect increase of his income, always in- 

 definite and uncertain, occasional and necessarily temporary, 

 can not seriously affect his deplorable condition and bring 

 to him more or less noticable relief. The fate of the Grange 

 represents the most eloquent and unanswerable argument in 

 this respect. 



Turning to the third and last phase of cooperation in agri- 

 culture, t. i., cooperation in marketing of agricultural prod- 

 ucts, it should be said this kind of agricultural cooperation 

 is a thing entirely unknown as yet to the modern industrial 

 and commercial world. It would be then an entirely new 

 machine put to work in the huge structure of modern agri- 

 cultural industry. This cooperation in marketing of agri- 

 cultural products by the farmers should consist of their social- 

 ized, concerted and coordinated efforts to sell their products 

 intelligently, with precise knowledge of the condition of 

 markets — local and national as well as international ones. 

 While the present competitive system of marketing of agri- 

 cultural products represents simply the blind throwing of 

 them on the next market in uncertain quantities, and at in- 

 definite, mostly inopportune times, so that they must take 

 their chances in finding there any purchaser at any price, the 

 new cooperative system of marketing of these products, 

 founded on the precise knowledge of the condition of the 



