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matter, without blinking or side-stepping?

In one state alone, New York, 400,000 people have deserted the farm for the city. Why? In another state-Vermont -rural population has gone back in many places 10 per cent. in ten years. Last year, the Russell Sage Foundation experts investigated what it cost in New York and Pittsburg at the lowest possible figure to sustain a family of five. Twist figures which way they might, those experts could not force the total lower than $600 for a year. Now the average wages of the average unskilled worker in the United States are not $600 a year. They are under $500. What is the result? Did men sell themselves to pay their debts? Not at all! The experts found whenever the price of meat went up, these people did without it. As the

prices of food mounted the ascending scale of the last five years, the number of people renting dark inside windowless tenements increased. That is the way the game that skins at both ends works when you follow it off the market into the homes of the poor.

There is no use shouting vaguely in the air against "trust-trusts." If you bring a bill of indictment against the trusts, they are going to say "prove it."

And there's less use telling men living is high because lots of gold is coming down from Alaska. More gold has gone to England from South Africa than has come to the United States from Alaska; and prices have not gone up correspond ingly in England. American meat sells cheaper in England than in the United States; and last year eggs were being imported to the United States from England because the price was cheaper. It is not convincing to tell a man hard up from high prices that his pocket book is empty because there is a lot of gold. He wants to know where that lot of gold goes.

And there is no use lecturing the farmer about his duties to stay on the land and feed the city. He is going to answer "show me"; and if you can show him more profit on the farm than in the factory, chains won't keep him in town. Nor is it logical to scold at the middleman!

He sees his chance for 500 per cent. profit, and he takes it, just as you

or I would take it in similar circumstances. If you accuse him of high prices, he goes into elaborate explanations of risk and loss on perishable products and the expense of big storage plants in congested centers, though that hardly explains why it paid the cold-storage men this last year to dump millions of dozens of eggs in the sea rather than break 50 cent prices. While eggs were costing 4 and 5 cents each in New York and Chicago last winter, and were being imported in shiploads from Europe and Asia, cold-storage men were talking scarcity; but no sooner did half a dozen states prepare to pass laws forbidding the storage of food products for longer than a year, than those same cold-storage men who had talked scarcity began dumping old eggs by millions of dozens into the sea. Prices dropped from 50 and 60 cents a dozen to 8 cents; and the stored eggs could not find purchasers. The storage men explained the eggs had been dumped into the sea because they had spoiled. The public that had been paying 60 cents a dozen wanted to know why those eggs had been held so long they had spoiled. Butter tumbled from 40 cents to 30, the lowest in ten years, though the number of cows had not increased; neither had the butter eaters decreased. And the drop in perishable foods within a week reacted on canned goods because people stopped buying canned vegetables when they could buy the fresh cheaper. In fact, for a family of three, the differences in prices from the time cold-storage laws forbade longtime keeping of food would run from 25 cents to $1 a day in food purchases.

But this sudden glut of the market. from sudden release of stored foods can hardly prove other than temporary, like the drop in Wall Street values when certain court decisions decisions have compelled speculators to sell. Long as the middleman plies his shuttle-like trade between producer and consumer, he will regulate prices. And can government regulations put him out of business? Would Supreme Court decisions sustain such regulations? It is so easy to hoist on the shoulders of government the duty that each man can and ought to do at first hand. The first people in the United States to wipe out the middleman have been the irrigation

farmers of the

West.

How? By getting together.

Why? Because the excessive cost of irrigation compelled the farmers to work together and pull in the same direction. When a valley of, say 20,000 people, all dip into the same well for

of living almost unendurable, a group of railroad men in a Pennsylvania city arranged to send one of their number to the country to buy direct from the farmer and save the swindle that cut the farmer 50 per cent. and jacked the buyer's price up 50 per The office man hired a rig and drove out. At the first farm where he stopped he found the farmer busy in the barn.

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THE FARMER SELLS HIS PORK AT FROM FOUR TO SIX CENTS A POUND

water, all draw prosperity or failure from the same ditch-there has to be harmony. In the East, each man is still dipping in his own little individual mud puddle. While Abram's herders quarreled with Lot's, the bandits stampeded the profits-same old problem as in scriptural days, isn't it? If irrigation never accomplished anything more than compelling co-operation, than pointing the way to elimination of the middleman, it would mark a new era in national life. In teaching communities how to use the same water; how to fight frosts and insects together; how to incorporate so they can borrow at lowest rates-2 per cent. instead of 6 per cent.; how to buy all supplies wholesale; how to keep their own agents. on the big world's markets; how to provide coldstorage warehouses and cars for their own perishable produce irrigation has pointed to the one and only effective way to eliminate the middleman, a way that avoids costly longdrawn-out appeals to the Supreme Court.

You may think the remedy sounds. too easy to be true. Don't flatter yourself! Try it, if you think it easy! Last year, when city people on salaries were feeling the increased cost

cent.

"Good day," saluted Mr. Office Man.

Mr. Farmer returned a gruff grunt with the cordiality ordinarily accorded a burglar. Undaunted, the city the city man launched his evangel. The farmer straightened up and listened. Wheat was selling at 60 cents in the country, butter at 22 cents, apples at $1 a barrel, etc. The city people purposed paying an advance of 20 to 40 per cent. on these prices if they could induce the farmers to guarantee definite supplies for the

year.

"But the prices might go higher."

"But we are guaranteeing you 20 per cent. higher than you have ever got." The farmer hummed, and hawed and

WHEN LAID ON THE CONSUMER'S TABLE IN THE FORM OF CHOPS. IT HAS GONE UP FIVE HUNDRED PER CENT.

rolled the suggestion backward and forward for an hour looking suspiciously for some graft. Then he found a loop-hole of escape from the convictions that had been forced on him. "It was like this, you see. His three boys were not home-couldn't induce them to stay on the farm. Queer -wasn't it? One was getting $40 a month as a street car conductor, another $30 in a fac

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Two CENTS A HEAD ON THE FARM

tory; and so on. Who was going to do the extra hauling? He hadn't time."

In vain, the city man pointed out that when city people sold goods, they also delivered them. Well, Mr. Farmer was not going to, so there-He didn't think much of the idea anyway. That office man went back without any supplies. If Mr. Farmer had had an annual water tax of from $1 to $6 an acre, and would have had his water shut off if he didn't pay,

TEN CENTS A HEAD IN THE CITY.

it is a safe wager he would have given different consideration to that plan of co-operation.

But all efforts to wipe out the middleman have not failed in the East. Wherever the compulsion has been acute enough to compel union, the middleman has had to go.

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Ter

In Erie, Pennsylvania, in December, 1899, sixty dairy men decided that milk. rates did not yield a living wage. For each dairy man to become an independent peddler would send prices still lower by competition. The sixty men signed a five years' contract to do no individual peddling but to act only as members of the Erie County Association. wagons were cut down to two. A threestory cold-storage milk plant was put up at a cost of $26,000, with $13,000 equipment, the expense being met by the members buying shares, though they paid only a percentage down for the shares, paying the balance in their milk deliveries. All milk was certified sanitary. All unsold product was utilized in ice cream, etc. Today, that dairy association has fifty-five employees, twenty-three drivers, twenty-two office men. The first year, returns amounted to $100,000. In 1909, sales totaled $225,000. Deducting wages, the net returns can be estimated. Of course, it was not all easy. Independents, big and little, fought them bitterly for two years, and caused diminished returns. The milk was delivered to the factory on a contract of under 4 cents a quart, or about the same price paid by

the big companies; but in this case, the profits went to the farmer, not to city shareholders. It is impossible to put the returns in terms of net profits to the farmer; for in each case, the profit would depend on the quality and cost of the

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COW.

The point is-by co-operation, the farmers got all the returns the big buyers would have paid them, plus their share of profits, which would otherwise have gone to the middleman. This scheme is practicable only

BOSSY DOESN'T KNOW HOW HIGHLY HER PRODUCT IS VALUED

but it is worth noting that seventeen counties in the Eastern States have dairymen's leagues aiming at such elimination of the middleman.

Over in Long Island, farming has become trucking for city supplies; and the Farmers' Exchange of Riverhead with a capital of $12,460 has done in 1910 a business of almost half a million. Each member's fee amounts to about $20 a year. The shares to make up the original capital were valued at $5. If you divide the gross returns by the number of shareholders-600-you can figure out that the members of the Farmers' Exchange reaped ample return for the annual fee of $20. Produce is shipped by boat. The salaried manager resides in

New York and handles the stuff exactly as a commission agent, only the commission goes back to the farmer; and the full city price goes to the farmer instead of a dozen city middlemen.

In Eastern Long Island, a Potato Exchange was organized by the growers. This exchange performs the same functions as the fruit associations of the West. Only the best seed is bought, never culls, and it is planted by machines. By wholesale purchase, the Exchange saves its members 8 cents a pound on insecticides and $2 a ton on fertilizer. The saving on fertilizer was $20,000 in a single year. In prices, the

Exchange has realized 10 cents higher a bushel than by the former haphazard sales. Profits for two seasons amounted to $200,000-profits not for the middleman but back to the farmer.

In Monmouth, New Jersey, the farmers of a co-operative association made 29 per cent profit in one year on a milliondollar business. Truck and fruit were shipped to one-hundred-and-thirty-six cities and twenty-three states. Fertilizer and seed were sold at wholesale to 800 members.

In Norfolk, Virginia, is a union of 400 truckers who have made 100 per cent on their capital stock, and saved ten times over the face value of their stock in wholesale purchase of seed and fertilizer.

In Mercer County, New Jersey, owing to a slack market, farmers found they were losing on small vegetables. Tomatoes rotted before they could be sold. In 1892, a canning factory was organized in a town of a thousand. Stock was sold at $50 a share. The plant put up cost almost $6,000. Land here yields 6 tons of tomatoes an acre, for which the fac

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THE DAIRYMAN DELIVERS HIS MILK AT FOUR, THE MIDDLEMAN

AT EIGHT CENTS.

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THE FARMER SELLS WOOD AT FIVE DOLLARS A CORDIt costs two dollars to cut it.

But how is your isolated up-state farmer, living amid such non-progressives as sent the office man home unsupplied-how is he to wipe out the middleman and remedy conditions? For him, there is only one way, by hook or crook, by some such ingenuity as the Vermont turkey raisers tried, to get in direct touch with the city buyer. Up in Maine, a farmer and his wife excelled in fancy cheese; but how to get a price for it? They began exhibiting at county and town fairs with name, address and price displayed. It took just five years to work up more orders than they could fill.

In Denmark, 162,000 cooperative farmers sell $78,000,000 of dairy produce a year, an average of more than $1,000 a member. In Russia are 800 co-operative milk factories using the product of 700,000 cows. In Germany, there are 19,000 similar societies. Why does America lag at the foot of the list in her farmers' co-operative societies?

THE CONSUMER MUST PAY EIGHT DOLLARS A CORD.

In

tory pays its shareholders $9 a ton. addition, all profits from factory go to the farmers who are shareholders. Up in Livingstone County-the most prosperous county in New York-the farmers have organized weekly exchanges, where produce can be sold as on a city grain exchange.

Down in Berkeley County, West Virginia, the fruit growers not only have an association similar to those in the West, but they are holding apple shows, apple carnivals, and festivals to promote the spirit of union and progress. "Pshaw," says your practical man, "I'll take all this sentiment in cash." All right, here is the way their sentiment cashed down. When the middlemen came buying apples in Berkeley County, they couldn't possibly offer higher than $2.50 a barrel. The growers had had "a gentlemanly understanding." They got $3 for 100,000 barrels inside of forty-eight hours: $50,000 extra cash for their spirit of union.

But all this, you say, remedies matters only for the country man. How about the town buyer? Wouldn't the truly cooperative association embrace consumer as well as producer? I am not advocating socialism. I never read a book on socialism or attended a meeting on it in my life. The point is to get that middleman's heavy foot off the city man's stomach; to keep that unseen hand of higher cost of living from picking your pockets and mine.

As long as the consumer does nothing but grumble, he will continue to have his pockets picked; and the middleman may sleep easy. For the consumer, there is only one way out, and it is the way that irrigation has taught-buyers must get together. That is what the consumers' co-operative leagues of England have done. They buy direct from the producer. Only 2 per cent. covers the ex

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