“There,” I said, “is a chance to start this big scheme of yours. Down the road I see the light from your neighbor’s window. Put on your hat, take the hired man and your boys and we will go right down there and organize the first chapter of this organization. No time like the present.”
The farmer’s face clouded. “Why, I haven’t spoken, to that man for three years. He would not keep up the line fence and I had to go to law and make him do it.”
I looked out of the window once more and saw another light to the north of us dimly visible in the darkness. “Well, then let us go to this other neighbor. I saw several men there as I came by.”
“That man! I wouldn’t trust him with fifty cents, and he would be sure to elect himself Treasurer.”
“Well, far across the pasture I see still another light. Shall we go there?”
“No, that man doesn’t know enough to go in the house when it rains.”
The farmer’s wife looked up from her sewing as if to speak, but the man answered for her.
“Oh, the women meet at the sewing circle and church, and while they talk about each other they keep together and do things for the neighborhood, but somehow the men folks don’t get on.”
Yet here was a man who planned to bring all the farmers of the country together and yet could not organize his own neighborhood, because men were kept apart by little prejudices and fancied wrongs. The women combined because they knew enough to realize that these petty things were non-essential, while the great community things could only be remembered by forgetting the meanness of every-day life.
Your city men will smile at this sermon in stones, and say that those farmers never can forget their differences and organize. Yet city life is worse yet. Many a man lives for years within a foot of his neighbor, yet never knows him. There may be only a brick wall between the two families, yet they might as well be 10 miles apart, so far as any community feeling is concerned. If dwellers on any block in the city could combine as a renting or buying association they would quickly settle the High Cost of Living burden, but while their interests are all in common they are unable to play the part of real neighbors. Farmers are coming to it largely through their women and children and the great National Farm Organization is by no means impossible for the future.