membership of half a million.

* Some difficulty was occasioned at this meeting by the
question of admitting negroes to the order, but this was
finally settled by making provision for separate lodges for
colored members.

With two great orders of farmers expanding in much the same territory
and having practically identical objects, the desirability of union
was obvious. The subject was discussed at meetings of both bodies, and
committees of conference were appointed. Both organizations finally
convened in December, 1888, at Meridian, Mississippi, and appointed a
joint committee to work out the details of amalgamation. The outcome was
a new constitution, which was accepted by each body acting separately
and was finally ratified by the state organizations. The combined order
was to be known as the Farmers' and Laborers' Union of America.

While this development had been going on in the South, another movement,
somewhat different in character and quite independent in origin, had
been launched by the farmers of the Northwest. The founder of the
National Farmers' Alliance, or the Northwestern Alliance, as it was
called to distinguish it from the Southern organization, was
Milton George, editor of the Western Rural of Chicago, who had been
instrumental in organizing a local alliance in Cook County. This
Alliance began issuing charters to other locals, and in October, at
the close of a convention in Chicago attended by about "five hundred,
representing alliances, granges, farmers' clubs, etc.," a national
organization was formed. The constitution adopted at this time declared
the object of the order to be "to unite the farmers of the United States
for their protection against class legislation, and the encroachments of
concentrated capital and the tyranny of monopoly;... to oppose, in our
respective political parties, the election of any candidate to office,
state or national, who is not thoroughly in sympathy with the farmers'
interests; to demand that the existing political parties shall nominate
farmers, or those who are in sympathy with them, for all offices within
the gift of the people, and to do everything in a legitimate manner that
may serve to benefit the producer." The specific measures for which the
promoters of the Northwestern Alliance intended to work were set forth
in a platform adopted at the second annual meeting in Chicago, October
5, 1881, which demanded: equal taxation of all propert