142 PROCEEDINGS OF TWENTY-SIXTH FRUIT-GROWERS' CONVENTION. 



trade, and that its life is only found in cooperation; and the time has 

 fully come when, to secure their rights and promote their best intertsts, 

 farmers must unite, as other classes have already done. 



The railroads have combined, and they are able to fix rates and fares 

 on the principle of charging all the traffic will bear, and the farmers of 

 the United States, in consequence thereof, pay enough in excess of just 

 charges on the transportation of their crops to probably build and equip 

 a transcontinental railroad every year. 



The steel industry has combined, and it is able to pay the president 

 of the combination, if we include his commissions, a salary which is more 

 than four times the salary of the President of the United States. 



The oil industry has combined, and the corporation is rolling up its 

 wealth by the hundreds of millions. 



Cooperation seems to permeate the very air we breathe, and all classes 

 of workers, except the farmer, have caught its inspiration. He has stub- 

 bornly refused to cooperate, except in a few instances, and as a result 

 he has become the victim of almost everything and almost everybody. 

 A good many people imagine that his lot is a highly favored one; that 

 all he has to do is simply to plow the ground and sow the seed, and then 

 sleep or recreate himself until the harvest time, when he can reap his 

 fields and exchange the products for cash. But the facts are far differ- 

 ent. The chinch bug destroys his wheat, and the grasshoppers and army 

 worms sweep his fields. Scale bugs infest his citrus orchard, and the 

 codling moth his apple trees. All kinds of peddlers, and life and fire 

 insurance and lightning-rod agents make him their prey. The papers 

 call him a hayseed, and he becomes a shining mark for the cartoonist. 

 About the only man who extends to him a glad hand is the politician 

 just before election day. 



Already an appalling number of farms are under mortgage. I am 

 persuaded that unless the farmers speedily learn the value of coopera- 

 tion and fall in line with the universal trend of modern industry, 

 a gigantic system of tenantry will take the place of the once happy, 

 independent rural homes, so long the pride and safeguard of the American 

 republic. 



The raisin -growers and citrus-fruit exchanges have perhaps advanced 

 the farthest in cooperative effort of any agricultural industries, and the 

 success which they have achieved should be a convincing object lesson 

 not only to the walnut-growers, but to all farm industries. The walnut- 

 growers themselves have demonstrated the great value of concentration 

 of interests in the marketing of their crops and the maintaining of 

 prices. But thus far they have only met with partial success, owing to 

 the fact that so large a percentage of the growers refuse to join associa- 

 tions. These outside growers have it in their power to break the market 

 at any time, which results in a feeling of uncertainty in prices, highly 

 detrimental to the industry. 



