I told him about the Pioneer Club and the prizes that were being offered. The amount made his eyes stick out. “Gee,” he answered, “guess I’ll have to move down.” “You’re welcome,” I said. “Come and bring your family.” We certainly did look like a busy community. Drive along the roads in any direction and you’d see acre after acre of upturned land. The smell of new earth was in the air and it was like tonic even to the passerby. During this busy preparatory season Holt kept his law office open evenings and it came to be a sort of club room. I planned to stay down there every evening until eleven and the two of us tried to straighten out the difficulties that arose. One of these was seeing to it that every man who showed himself to be in earnest had a proper supply of material with which to start his crop. We made arrangements with Moulton and with Gordon the hardware man to extend reasonable credit to everyone even in cases where credit had been withdrawn. Our argument that it was wiser to help a man get on his feet than keep him down was sound on the face of it. “These fellows mean business now,” I said to Gordon, “and if we go on half as well as we’ve begun there won’t be a man in this village who within a couple of years won’t be able to pay his bills. It’s up to you to do your part. Their success is your success. Give them credit for everything but patent medicines and you won’t lose.” While it was true that in doing this Gordon was choosing the lesser of two evils I realized that it wasn’t exactly fair either to force him and a few other merchants to bear the burden of financing these men without interest. But the small farmer is in a bad position. When the commercial business house needs money it can go to a bank and upon a statement of its business and its rating obtain money and credit on its signature. A small farmer has no business rating and can get money only upon a mortgage at six per cent., which is almost prohibitive. Of course the banks can’t be blamed for treating with individuals in this way but it struck me that something might be done about this if ever we got the community as a whole firmly bound together. The combined security of all the land and business in the village ought to mean something to a bank. In the meantime I was not neglecting my own land. I realized that there wasn’t much use in preaching the profits of farming unless I at least made the attempt to demonstrate it on my own acres. While on the one hand I was handicapped by lack of practical training, it struck me that this would make the experiment all the more interesting as showing what could be done by a man who availed himself of the knowledge of others, which, through the government bureaus and the State Agricultural School, was freely offered to everyone.