THE STORY OF THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE 



Yet if only enough farmers would agree to 

 stick by one kind of candidate in the primary 

 they would assuredly wrest the state into 

 their own hands and could pass what laws 

 they might wish. 



^For more than a year the bankrupted Town- 

 ley moved about North Dakota, turning these 

 things over in his mind and talking with farm- 

 ers about them. He found a universal dis- 

 gust with the iron terms held out to them by 

 the Interests that controlled the grain market, 

 a general readiness to do something against 

 those terms, no distinct notion of what could 

 be done. But the more he traveled and 

 talked the more clearly he saw that the con- 

 trol of the primary was the essential of vic- 

 tory, if victory there was to be. 



Much of his traveling was done on foot, he 

 being too poor to proceed otherwise. On some 

 days he walked thirty miles, for he is a lithe, 

 spare man, all muscle and endurance. As he 

 walked and talked a new agrarian movement 

 took shape in his mind. 



The state is in area one of the largest in the 

 Union, and compared with some others is 

 sparsely settled. To attempt to organize it 

 was appalling. The farmers had been ap- 

 proached (and stung) by so many plausible 

 and talented persons with grand schemes, 

 from the regeneration of mankind to a new 

 kind of pump, that they had come to look 



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