rmers'
organization as "one fruit grower and six government clerks." Kelley's
first conception seems to have been to organize the farmers of the
nation into a kind of Masonic order. The Patrons of Husbandry, which
was the official title of his society, was a secret organization, with
signs, grips, passwords, oaths, degrees, and all the other impressive
paraphernalia of its prototype. Its officers were called Master,
Lecturer, and Treasurer and Secretary; its subordinate degrees for men
were Laborer, Cultivator, Harvester, and Husbandman; for women--and
women took an important part in the movement--were Maid, Shepherdess,
Gleaner, and Matron, while there were higher orders for those especially
ambitious and influential, such as Pomona (Hope), Demeter (Faith), and
Flora (Charity). Certainly these titles suggest peace and quiet rather
than discontent and political agitation; and, indeed, the organization,
as evolved in Kelley's brain, aimed at nothing more startling than
the social, intellectual, and economic improvement of the agricultural
classes. Its constitution especially excluded politics and religion as
not being appropriate fields of activity. It did propose certain forms
of business cooperation, such as the common purchase of supplies,
the marketing of products, perhaps the manufacture of agricultural
implements; but its main idea was to contribute to the social
well-being of the farmers and their families by frequent meetings
and entertainments, and to improve farming methods by collecting
agricultural statistics and by spreading the earliest applications of
science to agriculture. The idea that the "Grange," as the organization
was generally known, would ultimately devote the larger part of its
energies to fighting the railroads apparently never entered the minds of
its founders.

Had it not been for the increasing agricultural discontent against
railroads and corporations in general, the Patrons of Husbandry would
probably have died a painless death. But in the early seventies this
hostility broke out in the form of minority political parties, the
principal plank in whose platform was the regulation of the railroads.
Farmers' tickets, anti-monopoly parties, and anti-railroad candidates
began to appear in county and even state elections, sometimes
achieving such success as to frighten the leaders of the established
organizations. The chief aim of the discontented was "protection from
the intolerable wrongs now