Holt read up on the subject and he found that coöperative farming which was so novel to us in the East had long been in successful operation in the West and South. That’s just the point. So are a hundred other good things. We in the East have urged our young farmers West until we have drained the East of its best. We have sent them forth like missionaries in such numbers that now we need some of them back as missionaries to ourselves. It’s those same men in the West who have been first to seize upon the new ideas in agriculture, while their eastern brothers have gone along in the same old ruts. New England as a whole has been treated like one vast deserted farm not worth anyone’s trouble. The Government itself treats it as such. It’s eager enough to spend millions on draining projects in Florida or irrigation projects in the West while there are whole townships in the State of Maine in as primeval a condition as they were at the landing of the Pilgrims. It’s actually so. If Maine were located in Oregon it would be to-day the richest State in the Union. But as sure as fate the old-world pioneers will soon rediscover it if we don’t ourselves, for to them Maine is the Far West. I find I get switched back to that theme every time I trace a new feature of our development. As I said, Holt read up on the subject of coöperative farming as he always read up on every new subject before tackling it. About the first thing he ran into was the history of the Eastern Shore of Virginia Produce Exchange--an enterprise which reads like romance. Every farmer in New England ought to read it. Holt gave a talk on it before the club and everyone listened in amazement. Here was a good farming country settled by industrious well-meaning farmers who raised good stuff, but who in 1899 found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy. It was each man for himself and sometimes they sold their crops for half what it cost to raise them. As individuals they couldn’t reach their market without giving up their profits to commission men and railroads. Then someone organized the exchange and so poor were its members that a membership fee of only five dollars was charged with the privilege of paying only twenty-five cents down and the rest in installments. During the first year the organization shipped four hundred thousand barrels of produce; ten years later it was shipping one million four hundred thousand barrels. It now handles every year one million barrels of Irish potatoes and eight hundred thousand barrels of sweet potatoes. During the last three years it has done an average business of two million five hundred thousand dollars a year. It has lifted a stagnant community into a prosperous community within a decade.