i62 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



formed, as a means of combating the all too cute cornerers 

 and groups of railway companies which kept farmers for- 

 cibly in subjection. The " corners " and railway harpies 

 were fought by the Elevator Companies, of which there 

 are at present more than 2,900 in the States, and have 

 found that such could give a good account of themselves. 



Thus practically the entire civilised world shows its 

 Agriculture organised and profits thereby. We alone 

 remain unorganised. By our very side is Ireland, with 

 its goodly array of societies of various kinds, the result 

 of a movement which sprung up little more than twenty 

 years ago, strengthening the feeble, providing markets 

 where previously there were none, and thoroughly uniting 

 — as the one thing which has ever succeeded in doing so — 

 in the common interest, for the good of one common 

 country — literally all the otherwise conflicting and ever 

 wrangling parties of the green and orange, the Roman and 

 Presbyterian, the Gaelic and Sassenagh kingdom. 



In all the countries named it is a touch of necessity which 

 has brought farmers together to work — and, if necessary, 

 to fight — in unison. Agriculture was poor. Or, as has 

 happened in Denmark, German closing of one market necessi- 

 tated to searching for another, which, it turned out, could 

 only be secured by united action, so as to furnish uniform 

 standard goods in sufiicient quantity. Or else, and for the 

 most part, it was the other business interests, the usurer, 

 the trader, in one word, the middleman, who, very naturally, 

 tries to make a profit at either end of his bargain, and who 

 has an ugly knack of getting the unsuspecting, weakly 

 yielding farmer into his toils, and place him by degrees in 

 abject subjection, who became the moving cause. Now the 

 middleman is a most useful institution, where he is wanted 

 — that is, where the two factors of supply and demand 

 cannot otherwise be brought into touch with one another. 

 But wherever they can be so brought, he becomes a decided 

 nuisance, very much de trop, and a very leech and octopus for 

 sucking blood out of, or fastening his tentacles upon, hapless 

 victims, and drawing them down into the deep — the un- 

 fathomable deep of peonap'eand ruin. In India, where the 



