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ten years as he ought to have been, and he is not now. Why? One reason 

 is that out of every dollar the consumer spends for farm products the 

 farmer gets less than fifty cents. Where does the other fifty cents go? 

 It goes to the railroads and the middlemen, and to the legitimate cost 

 of distribution. Now if it is true that the best the present system of dis- 

 tribution can do is to double the cost of the farmer's products to the con- 

 sumer, then it is certainly a very inefficient system. If it costs as much 

 to get a pound of butter to the consumer as it does to make it, then it is a 

 bad system and no mistake. We in the United States are just awakening 

 to a real appreciation of the benefits of co-operation in agriculture. 



Farmers in Ireland, Denmark, Holland and Belgium have had their 

 hard times when the industry was in such a condition that man could 

 hardly live off of it. In Ireland there were whole counties in which the 

 average cash income of a farmer's family was only $25.00 a year. It 

 sounds incredible, but it is true. Then a man came back to Ireland from 

 Wyoming, where he had been a cow-puncher — I mean Sir Horace Plun- 

 kett — and he said to the Irish farmer, ''I know what is the matter with 

 you, you are unorganized, and everywhere in the world it is the unorgan- 

 ized man that pays the bill." Then in little Ireland they began to organize. 

 Ireland is a very small country, yet already 100,000 farmers are organized 

 there. Their co-operative societies do an annual business of $16,000,000 

 to $17,000,000, and they have completely changed the whole face of agri- 

 cultural Ireland. 



The city is organized, the railroads are organized, the interest to 

 which the farmer sells his product, and the interests from which he buys 

 the things he needs are all organized. The farmer is the one great class 

 in the United States today that remains unorganized. There has been a 

 good deal of work done in this matter of farm organization in this country, 

 and while I am not urging any farmers to rush into organization, I do 

 believe that when the pinch comes, as come it must, agricultural organi- 

 zation is the way out. It has failed in individual cases all over this country, 

 partly because the farmers have not realized that it takes just as good a 

 business man to run the business of co-operative organization as it does 

 to run any other; partly because they have allowed other men to organ- 

 ize them, and the organization was directed mainly toward the welfare 

 of someone else. It has not been driven into the farmer's mind yet with 

 sufficient clearness that co-operation in the real sense does not mean a 

 joint stock enterprise where the voting power goes with the stock, but it 

 does mean an enterprise where every man has the same voting power 

 irrespective of the amount of his stock. In other words, an organization 

 to be successful must be controlled by men, not by money. Organization 

 is a powerful weapon, but like any other powerful weapon it is dangerous 

 as well as powerful, and unless it is rightly used it will do no good. But 

 the time is coming when in this country, as almost everywhere in Europe, 

 farmers will attend to their own matters of credit, to their own matters 



