the extremes of the
city and yet shall get country people to working together harmoniously and
happily. Only thus can life in the open country maintain itself in a
social age for successful business, church, home, school or social life.
Only thus can country character develop its capacity for those social
satisfactions which are the crowning joys of a complete and harmonious
civilization. But those who have faith in the fundamental vitality and
adaptability of rural life believe that even this serious weakness in
cooperation can be gradually overcome and country life be made as
effective for its own purposes as life in the city. This faith is
justified by large success already thus attained in progressive rural
sections with the modern spirit.

_The Difficulty of Organizing Farmers_

Five reasons are mentioned by President Butterfield to account for this
difficulty: Ingrained habits of individual initiative; Financial
considerations; Economic and political delusions which have wrecked
previous organizations of farmers; Lack of leadership; and Lack of unity.
Under lack of leadership, he says: "The farm has been prolific of
reformers, fruitful in developing organizers, but scanty in its supply of
administrators. It has had a leadership that could agitate a reform,
project a remedial scheme, but not much of that leadership that could hold
together diverse elements, administer large enterprises, steer to great
ends petty ambitions."[24] Yet country-bred leaders have been wonderfully
successful in the city under different social conditions.

Failures in leadership are often due to failure to get support for the
project in hand. This in turn is due to lack of common purposes and
ideals. A successful leader personifies the ideals of his following.
Unless there is unity in ideals the following disintegrates. Here again
the rural unsocial streak shows plainly. Individual notions, ideas and
remedies for social ills have been so various, it has taken the stress of
some great common cause, the impulse of some powerful sentiment, or the
heat of some mighty moral conflict to fuse together the independent
fragments. This was done when Lincoln sounded the appeal to patriotism in
'61; when Bryan's stirring eloquence aroused particularly the debtor
farmer class in '96; and when the projectors of the Farmers' Alliance, the
Grange and the Populist Party succeeded in their appeals to class
consciousness and convinced the farmers of the