Holt had a catchy way of talking and always succeeded in putting the crowd into good humor and also in throwing a glamour of romance over everything. We couldn’t have had a better man. But as I said, the greatest good of these meetings came in the community idea which was fostered. Associating here week after week for a common purpose we began to feel friendly and intimate with one another. Farmers are naturally an independent lot and the worse farmers they are the more independent they are apt to be. Lack of success instead of humbling them makes them even cockier, as it does for that matter with people in any walk of life who have any backbone. They find plenty of excuse for their failure outside themselves. Newspapers and muckraking magazine articles and politicians furnish them with arguments enough to explain how they are being robbed and abused. These things sink in deep among farmers when they sink in at all, because they have time to think them over and digest them. But it sinks into them as individuals and not as a body. The result is that not only do they become suspicious of the outside world but suspicious of one another. It makes them even more pronounced separate units. Up to a certain point this is not only a good thing but the best possible thing. It has preserved their individuality. Organization after organization has tried to herd them together and reduce them to a mere class so as to drive them in one direction for their own selfish ends, but happily without result. They won’t be driven. Even the organizations which have had a less sordid interest in the task have failed to hold them together for any length of time, which in my opinion has saved them from being swallowed up. But this independence is carried to extremes in the smaller communities and it was so in our town. Every man was suspicious of his neighbor. Though engaged in the same work and with many interests in common every man felt himself a competitor, not with the outside world, but with his nearest neighbor. They wouldn’t pull together on anything. We didn’t overcome this feeling in a minute but we did accomplish a lot towards it even during this first summer. In a way this prize system might be expected to increase individual competition, but even to the end of winning the prizes we forced everyone to work together which more than made up.