THE STORY OF THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE 



ment was conducted by lawyers, an element 

 constituting a fraction of 1 per cent, of the 

 population; farmers constituting 80 per cent, 

 had nothing to say about the business. Even 

 the lawyers, again, could not be said here, 

 as in some regions, to be chosen because of 

 superior wisdom or skill in lawmaking. On 

 the contrary, they were chosen by the rail- 

 roads, the elevator companies, the millers, and 

 the banks (all of these being Interests outside 

 of the state), and by these chosen because of 

 their superior ductility hi the hands of those 

 that had chosen them. 



It is hard to deal with these things without 

 seeming to be partisan or bitter, and I have 

 no impulse to be either. The facts, as learned 

 by every fair-minded person that investigated 

 them, were much worse than I have indicated, 

 so that North Dakota was a political grand- 

 duchy with a governing class as rigid as the 

 nobility in a German principality before the 

 war. This anomalous condition of rule by 

 the minority was possible only because the 

 farmers had always failed to vote together. 

 On any appearance of union among them the 

 whole structure of corporation government 

 would have blown up. Therefore, the alarm 

 of the old-school politicians was natural and 

 well founded when they beheld a union of 

 farmers that could not be terrified, but that 

 manifested a grimly fixed purpose to rule, 



206 



