THE STORY OF THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE 



Townley has an unusual gift for organization. 

 To this must be added unusual powers of per- 

 suasion, but far beyond these he must have had 

 a cause of enduring vitality or he could never 

 have made his phenomenal progress through 

 North Dakota. In a short time he had many 

 organizers at work enrolling members and tak- 

 ing subscriptions on commission. 



This feature of the work has been much 

 criticized, but I do not know how else it 

 could have been done. The canvassers re- 

 ceived a percentage of the checks they col- 

 lected, and it seems to be the view of the 

 critics that they should have done the work 

 for nothing. I may note here that all these 

 critics are and were opposed to the forming 

 of the League, anyway, and it is likely that if 

 the service had been gratuitous they would 

 have discovered some other fault in it. There 

 may be men that could afford to give freely, 

 in a spirit of beautiful altruism, the time and 

 hard labor necessary to secure these mem- 

 bers, but assuredly they would be men that 

 would not know how to address the farmers of 

 North Dakota, in the first place, and would not 

 care to do it, in the second. The farmers' 

 cause was a poor man's cause; if it had been 

 a rich man's cause there would have been no 

 need to seek enlistments for it; and being a 

 poor man's cause, those that gave their time to 

 it must have their per-diem revenue or starve. 



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