Europe seems to have had wiser leaders in the coöperative work, as well as more docile followers. The American passion for bigness has largely ruled both leaders and followers. Where the Old World peoples were content to begin with small organizations for a definite purpose and let these organizations grow and develop into powerful institutions, the farmers of America have thought in terms of a continent, tried to organize nationwide societies to transact every kind of business—and failed lamentably. It has been only a few years since a great noise was made by a society which proposed to unite all farmers in one great society which should fix a minimum price on all farm products and so settle matters out of hand. Just a year or two ago Farmers’ Union leaders in the South were telling the cotton farmers that only a great national organization could be of any real help in the marketing of their crop. The disastrous failures of the big organizations which were going to “finance the cotton crop” and the successes along various lines attained by some local and county organizations have discredited these leaders who mistook rhetoric for business sense and possibly also taught them a few things they needed to know. The great trouble with farmers’ coöperative organizations in this country has been that they were too loosely organized and attempted to do too much. It is just beginning to dawn on the mind of the average farmer that a coöperative business must be conducted on the same general lines as an individual business and that he cannot secure the benefits of coöperation without giving up some of the privileges of individual action. He is learning, too, not to despise the day of small things. The lesson has been learned by some, however, in the long years of struggle for fair prices and fair treatment by the commercial world, and here and there all over the country are to be found groups of farmers who have found out the principles of business coöperation and put them into action to their own decided profit. These organizations are interesting not only for what they have done, but also for what they teach. Take the Southern Produce Company, of Norfolk, Virginia, for example. This association was organized in 1870 and now has 400 members. It handles most of the truck grown in the vicinity of Norfolk, handling for outsiders—at a fixed percentage—as well as for its own members. It not only sells the truck the members grow, but buys their seeds, fertilizers and other supplies. It has bought and equipped an experimental farm near Norfolk, turning it over to the State to run, and lately has erected a six-story office building in the city, building and lot costing $135,000. All this has been done without putting in a dollar except for the capital stock which is limited to $15,000.