The next step then--the coöperative step--came about naturally and almost inevitably. No one planned it and no one so far as I remember suggested it. It would have been a dangerous thing to suggest directly. As a phrase it smacked of socialism and there were mighty few socialists in our town. Our inheritance and our training was all against it. There wasn’t a man so poor that even if he was willing to make a martyr out of himself would let anyone else make a martyr out of him. The worse off he was, the more independent he became. He would rather play a lone hand at a losing game than win by joining his troubles with those of someone else. Your bred-in-the-bone New Englander is a solitary man who, when pressed to the wall, turns and fights his own fight. He’ll unite against a common outside enemy but not against his own. It’s this spirit that made our nation, but it’s this spirit too which is to-day destroying the man himself. With a closer knit civilization demanding coöperation he is as a rule so jealous of his personal rights that he balks. And after all, that’s the pioneer spirit too. Coming into town as an outsider I was in a position to see certain things that were not apparent to those born and brought up here. That is always possible to anyone approaching a new business with his eyes open. I had found it so when I began work as a ditch digger. Within a year I detected flaws to which those who had given their lives to construction work were blind. I was unburdened with bewildering details and prejudices. So in this town my eyes were fresh and I viewed the village not altogether from the unit of my own farm but as a whole. I was a stockholder in a corporation owning a million and more dollars’ worth of buildings and land, and employing hundreds of hands. Consequently I was able to consider any new project not only as it affected my own small interest but as it affected the whole corporation. The question of raising our own meats then was not with me merely a question of keeping a beef, some sheep, pigs and chickens for myself but a matter of saving the corporation the thousands of dollars which would result in the general undertaking. So it was natural enough to me when the matter of buying full-blooded breeders came up which were beyond the means of any one individual, to suggest that the Pioneer Club, which represented the corporation, should do something towards making this easy. I had no idea of any general coöperative plan in doing this, but the idea was just the spark needed to kindle that whole burning issue.