Five reasons are mentioned by President Butterfield to account for this difficulty: Ingrained habits of individual initiative; Financial considerations; Economic and political delusions which have wrecked previous organizations of farmers; Lack of leadership; and Lack of unity. Under lack of leadership, he says: "The farm has been prolific of reformers, fruitful in developing organizers, but scanty in its supply of administrators. It has had a leadership that could agitate a reform, project a remedial scheme, but not much of that leadership that could hold together diverse elements, administer large enterprises, steer to great ends petty ambitions."[24] Yet country-bred leaders have been wonderfully successful in the city under different social conditions. Failures in leadership are often due to failure to get support for the project in hand. This in turn is due to lack of common purposes and ideals. A successful leader personifies the ideals of his following. Unless there is unity in ideals the following disintegrates. Here again the rural unsocial streak shows plainly. Individual notions, ideas and remedies for social ills have been so various, it has taken the stress of some great common cause, the impulse of some powerful sentiment, or the heat of some mighty moral conflict to fuse together the independent fragments. This was done when Lincoln sounded the appeal to patriotism in '61; when Bryan's stirring eloquence aroused particularly the debtor farmer class in '96; and when the projectors of the Farmers' Alliance, the Grange and the Populist Party succeeded in their appeals to class consciousness and convinced the farmers of their need of union. Rural movements however have usually been short-lived. II. Failures in Rural Cooperation. _Lack of Political Effectiveness_ Farmers usually do their duty serving on juries and in minor civil offices. They are usually fairly well represented in state legislatures. But few farmers go to Congress or gain real leadership in politics. In proportion to their numbers, the rural people have marvelously little influence in the affairs of government. We have in this country no Agrarian party. The farmers are divided among the different political camps and seldom do they exert any great influence as a class in the making of the laws. There are about seventy times as many agriculturists as lawyers in the United States,--yet the lawyers exert vastly greater civic influence and greatly outnumber farmers in most law-making bodies. Yet there are about fifty million rural people in the country, largely in farm households. The average farmer in 1910 paid taxes on 138 acres besides other property. Why should he not have more political influence? Why has he not demanded and secured a dominating influence in the state? There is probably no reason except lack of cooperation, and adequate leadership to accomplish it. _Lack of Cooperation in Business_