The Green Forest tribune., 1910-06-10
SUCCESS OF FARMERS UNION
President Barrett at St. Louis ConVen- ton Tells of Big Increase in
 Membership.

Our principles and our way of ap- plying them must be sound, for we have increased from less than fifty thousand membership six years ago to a membership today rising three mil lion. Throughout the southern states we are well organized. In the middle west we are formally organized and our members are rapidly growing. This year we have perfected organization in several of the western and Pacific slope states, and we shall soon invade New England.
 In the south, we have succeeded in obtaining for the farmer a reasonable price for his backbone staple, cotton That means, we have ministered in every phase of southern commerce, that we have laid every southerner under obligations to us, for cotton is the financial barometer of the south ern states. In the middle west we are recording headway in handling, in a scientific and equitable manner, wheat and corn. In the far west we are ac complaining results in the systemati zing of the fruit industry and of gen. eral agricultural products.
 The financial success of our pro gram is important, but 1t is exceeded by our moral and intellectual progress and evolution, which is reflected in tho forward status of the American farmer generally, for I hold that organization n a fnr hoc, fr1n ifa1N Ivy benefited every tiller of the soil in this country, whether or not he is directly affiliated with the organization.
 Through our national, state and To- cal organizations we have been per sistently preaching scientific agricul- ture, diversified agriculture, conserva- tiOn of soil resources, rotation of crops.
 We have encouraged in every state more liberal measures for popular education, insisting that the fathers and mothers of farm children should make every sacrifice that their sons and daughters might be better equip ped for the word-fray than they were themselves.
 One of our most signal triumphs, and tremendously significant one, is our success in teaching interdepend- ence, in illustrating and persuading into being the vitalizing forces of CO operation. By nature the most inde- pendent of individuals, holding him. self aloof from his fellows, in love with his own opinion, jealous of undis- puted command of his acres and re- senting intrusion of new and strange ideas, he is gradually learning the value of abating these qualities in favor of cooperation.
 He is seeing that to the end of in- troducing business means of market ing his crop, of tilling his so>l and of reaping the benefits of civilization, he must concede a little of that old, stub born independence, just as his neigh Dor conceded a little of his independ- ence.
 He Is learning that united effort is invincible, while individual effort not only fails invariably to aid the indi- Vidual but that it may we'll work to the prejudice of the interest of the masses.
 Our warehouse system in the south, our warehouse and cooperative busi- ness enterprises throughout the mid dle and far west, are revolutionizing the viewpoint of the farmer. We have proceeded on the theory that farming was as exact a profession as the law, medicine or barter and trade, and that only in the degree the farmer founded hi dealings upon business principles would he get away from the lost mo- tion, the waste and the uncertainty that formerly characterized his history under the hit-and-miss system of farm ing.
 But 1 think quite the most impor- tant indirect achievement of the Farm CTS union is the success with which we are intoxicating the doctrine that every man is, indeed, "his brothers keeper" We have not secured a uni versal observance of the doctrine, but it is daily making more impressive strides. And to those who would deal with the farmer, who would tighten the lot of the farmer, I commend the idea that they must plan and execute upon the basis of the mutuality of human obligations.