Norwich bulletin., 1912-08-17

CWritten Specially for The Bulletin.)
 don't know but some of you are tired almost to death of having me talk so much about cooperation among farmers.
 Those who are please skip this, and turn right over to the column of marriages and deaths or the baseball news, or something else which you think worthy of your intelligent at tentiOn.
 Frankly it makes me tired" to see the way in which the west is taking advantage of the cooperative idea, while we of the east are afraid to touch it with one of our fingers. Every farm state of the west is sown with cooperative enterprises of one sort or another. I don't mean merely co-op- erative stores, such as we have sue cessfully working in Maine and New York: mean farmer-c combinations for the purpose of buying and selling in common wherever there is advan- tage in so doing
 The last three western papers l hap pened to pick up,-The Prairie Farm er of Chicago, The Farmer of St. Paul, Ainn., and The Dakota Farmer, each enc gave up more space to accounts of cooperative farmers organizations within their respective bishopAics than to any other one subject.
 There were reports from clubs which marketed their butter and eggs togeth- CT; from clubs which sold their fruit and potatoes together; from clubs which sold broilers and bought poultry feed together; from clubs which bought grass seed and bran and stock molasses together by the carload; 1; from clubs which united their house. hold orders so as to buy their sugar and tea and salt and cereals together.
 Most of these clubs reported that their members secured a higher price for what they sold than that which prevailed among individual sellers around them. All of them reported a considerable saving in the cost of the goods they purchased. That is, most of them got more money when they went to market, and all of them left less money for the boughten goods they brought back.
 For years we farmers have been so regularly remorselessly skinned both ways, going and coming, that it ought to cheer us somewhat to find way to escape the skin removing process in either direction.
 But what makes me wonder most is why this palpably easy and satis factory way of both making money and saving money should be so popu- lar all through the west and so un- popular in the east It can't be be- cause we eastern communities are old CT and slower to take up innovations Why, there are countries in Europe whose farms had been cultivated 8 NL (t.I, d covered America where cooperation is more widely accepted and practised than in the west, even. If the age of a farming community were to bar it from interest in this modern form oi economics then little old Denmark where they kept cattle and made cheese in Julius Caesars day, wouldn't be organized in cooperation from one end to the other,-as it now is.
 I've puzzled over this mystery a long ,ime. And don't seem to get no for rarder' towards the solution. There are plenty of differences between the westerner and the easternr-differ- ences superficial and differences deep seated. But cooperation is essentially matter of simple common sense We're not ready yet,-at least one o1 us is not,-to admit that westernerS have more of that quality than we.
 Some years ago a westernwomar who had become accustomed to the western way of looking at things anC of doing them, came east and essay ed to settle down in a quiet New Eng land hamlet of two or three hundred years antiquity. She was charmed by the reposeful air of the village; It's sense of restfulness, and the sug- gestion of culture" which she thought she appreciated. At first everything was lovely as her dreams had painted But, as she gradually-oh, very, very gradually to have knowledge o1 the real inner life of the so peacefu surfaced neighborhood, she found tha' all was not as blissful as it seemed Front gates swung easily indeed, or