The farmers having made their promise and agreed heartily in the proposal, adjourned. Weeks and months passed and the time approached for planting cotton. Farmer after farmer, who had attended these meetings and given his promise, privately decided that he would plant a cotton crop and secretly expected that he would secure a larger price that year because so many of his neighbors were to raise other crops. When the full season for planting cotton had come it was discovered that so many farmers had planted cotton that the plan of co-operation was a failure, and the whole district went back to cotton, with full prospect of assisting the boll weevil in his course toward the East. The reasons for this action lie in the type of farmer who thus found it impossible to co-operate. Each of these farmers regarded above all other things the success of his own farm and his own family group. In contrast to this interest no other claim, no exhortation and not even his word given in public had any lasting influence upon his action. The third element in the inability of country people to co-operate is the ideal of level democratic equality which prevails in the country. Where universal land-ownership has been the rule every countryman thinks himself "as good as anybody else." So long as this ideal prevails, that subjection of himself to another, and the controlling of his action by the interests of the community, are impossible. The farmer cannot co-operate when he thinks of social life in terms of pure democracy. There must be a large sense of team work, a loyal and instinctive obedience to leaders, a devoted spirit which looks for honest leadership, before there can be co-operation. These things come not by persuasion, but by experience. Co-operation is the act of a mature people. Not until country people have passed through earlier stages and discarded earlier ideals can the preacher and the organizer and the teacher successfully inculcate a spirit of co-operation. Country churches are highly representative in their present divided condition. This multiplication of churches in the country is lamentable chiefly because it registers the divided state of country life. It is true that divided churches are religiously inefficient, but it is vastly more important that divided churches are embodiments of what one country minister calls "the tuberculosis of the American farmer, individualism."