97 



As I said a few moments ago, so long as the middleman, particularly 

 the commission man, is a necessity, nothing is to be gained by attacking 

 him. He is a necessity. He is here to stay so long as conditions remain 

 as they are. When conditions change so as to make him unnecessary, 

 he will disappear automatically and you will not need to attack him 

 at all. I have recently spent some little time in the best organized coun- 

 try in the world, I suppose, agriculturally speaking, Denmark. A dis- 

 tinguishing fact in Denmark is the way in which the farm products are 

 standardized at the farm. We imagine sometimes that they have a great 

 marketing association, but they have nothing of the kind, because when 

 they standardize their own products at the farm they do not need to do 

 much marketing. The buyers come and take the produce off their hands 

 because the product is uniform in quality and absolutely standardized, 

 and the buyer anywhere can order from any part of Denmark and get 

 what he wants. For example, I will take one bacon-curing establishment 

 at Frederickssund, in which I spent some little time. They were receiving 

 orders daily from small grocerymen in New Castle and other English 

 towns, besides selling large quantities to large buyers. The small grocery- 

 man in an English town can order from any of these co-operative bacon 

 factories, because he knows that every hundred pounds of Danish bacon 

 is like every other hundred pounds. The secret of it is not discovered 

 until you get back to the farms themselves. You may ride a hundred 

 miles through rural Denmark, visit a thousand farms, and look at ten 

 thousand pigs, and you will find them all alike, of one breed and as nearly 

 alike as animals of a standardized breed ever are. In the second place, 

 they are all marketed at about the same weight. They figure that a pig 

 from 180 to 200 pounds makes the kind of bacon which the English con- 

 sumer wants. So the pigs are uniform not only in breed, color and 

 quality, but in size. The curing process is standardized. One hundred 

 pounds, as I said, of Danish bacon is like every other hundred pounds 

 and the quality is guaranteed. 



Mr. Egan, our Minister to Denmark, said that within a short time 

 before we were there, the report came back from London that a couple of 

 shipments of Danish butter had been below par. It was made a national 

 issue. Apologies were sent around to the different legations, not that 

 they had bought any, but because the people thought that somehow it 

 was a stain on the national honor. Is there any mystery or magic about 

 the fact that Danish butter sold well? The people have been told their 

 own obligations and opportunities, but they have not been taught to lay 

 the blame on the other fellow. They have risen to their opportunities 

 under this teaching, and the world comes to them for its products. That 

 is one case, at least, where godliness is profitable. 



Let me summarize what I have said thus far. If the farmer will 

 grade and standardize his own products, make them uniform in quality, 

 put them in uniform packages, standardized in such form that the average 



