mers' company had collected for its shippers nearly two thousand
dollars in such claims, a beginning sufficient to illustrate that the
Company was destined to serve the farmers in many practical ways if
they would only stand behind it.

IF the farmers would stand behind it! But would they? It was a
question which was forever popping up to obscure the future. Many
tongues were busy with inuendo to belittle what the farmers had
accomplished already and to befog their efforts to advance still
farther. At every shipping point in the West industrious little
mallets were knocking away on the Xylophone of Doubt, all playing the
same tune: "Just Kiss Yourself Good-Bye!" No farmers' business
organization ever had been a success in the past and none ever could
be. This new trading venture was going to go off with a loud bang one
of these fine days and every farmer who had shipped grain to it would
stand a first-class chance of losing it. You betcha! The Grain
Growers' Associations mightn't be so bad; yes, they'd done some good.
But this concern in the grain business--run by a few men, wasn't it?
Well, say, does a cat go by a saucer of cream without taking a lick?
"Farmers' company" they called it, eh? Go and tell it to your
grandmother!

The worst of it was that in many localities were farmers who believed
this very suggestion already--that the Company belonged to the men at
the head of its affairs. Discouraged by past failures and without much
respect for the dignity of their occupation, their attitude towards the
Company was almost automatic. That it was a great co-operative
movement of their class, designed to improve economic and social
conditions, was something quite out of their grasp. And upon these
strings, already out of tune, elevator men strummed diligently in an
effort to create discord.

From the first it had been like that. Friends who would speak a good
word for the struggling venture at the time it was most needed were
about as scarce as horns on a horse. On the other hand the organizers
ran across "the knockers" at every turn. A traveller for one of the
milling companies, for instance, happened to get into conversation on
the train with E. A. Partridge one day. The latter was a stranger to
him and he naturally supposed he was talking to "just a farmer." The
subject of conversation was the grain trade and this traveller began to
make a few remarks about the "little grain company" that had start