It is a fact that a great part of the flour is made from “rejected” wheat; and the sole point of the rejecting is to lower the price. I asked, “What is the price of rejected wheat?” and the answer was, “It is a bottomless pit—you can buy it for anything.” They reject wheat if there is water in it—but they have to put water in it themselves in order to mill it! They reject it for smut—but they use it just the same, because the brush that takes off the bran also takes off the smut! They even use the mouldy wheat, because they bleach it. Many times Professor Bolley found them rejecting wheat for smut, and he would go to that neighborhood and learn there was little or no smut to be found there, and the elevator men made no effort to keep the wheat with smut separate from the rest. The elevator and grading workers would tell him that they had received word—there was too much wheat on the market, and they were to buy only “rejected” wheat—as an act of charity to those poor farmers who had got smut into their wheat; but the effect of this action was to force more farmers into ruin. Professor Bolley was invited to accompany fifty scientists, including some from Europe, to inspect the flour mills in the “Twin Cities.” Here came the prize “boosters” of the millers, setting forth the wonders of the place and the extreme precautions they took to use only the very finest wheat—they were making their best flour. Professor Bolley dipped his hand into one hopper and then into another, and carried home samples of this wheat. Fifty per cent of it consisted of amber durum, which they rejected, seven per cent of another rejected kind, and the balance of a very inferior grade of winter wheat; no hard spring wheat in the sample! And yet the millers would invite Professor Bolley to the Chamber of Commerce, to tell them how they could teach the farmers to raise better wheat! Professor Bolley went to Russia and spent a year collecting hardy wheats; the Siberian wheat which he brought home thrived, but the millers said it was worthless—and they bought it cheap. Then the farmers stopped growing it; whereupon the millers suddenly decided that this Siberian wheat was good; the climate had changed it, they said! Meantime, Professor Ladd had set up a model bakery and a flour mill at the experiment station, and on the basis of his demonstrations, President Worst was showing the farmers of North Dakota how they could save the sum of fifty-five million dollars a year, by setting up elevators and mills, and exporting flour instead of wheat. In this demonstration lay the beginnings of the Nonpartisan League movement, and the masters of the Money Trust perceived that they must crush these rebel educators. How they tried to do it is the story we have next to hear. CHAPTER XLII AN AGRICULTURAL MELODRAMA