We think the farmer is altogether too slow to recognize his interests, and especially attacks on his interests by other classes; that he is too slow to fight for his rights; that he is too slow to organize; and that he is too much disposed to be content with pay for his labor that is altogether too small, and with condition that are altogether unjust to him and his interests, says the Farmers’ Call.
Nevertheless, we must say that we consider farming the best occupation for all. If we thought otherwise we would sell our farm land and engage in something else. Furthermore, we believe that on the average the agricultural classes of this country have more intelligence, ability and stamina and staying qualities than any other class, and we will not except bankers or preachers or anybody else. The great fault of the farmer is that he works too hard and thinks too little of the farm and of what others are scheming and doing.
But when the farmer once does get aroused and gets into action, he certainly does make things move. It has long been known that the best man to avoid in a fight is the man that is slow to get mad. When he does get mad, it means something. That can be depended upon. As we pointed out a short time ago, nothing was done to curb the power of corporations; in fact, it was accepted as a truth that the state could not control them, until the ‘70s the Grangers showed the corporations a thing or two, and wrote it into the fundamental corporation law of the world that the government, state or national, which creates a corporation, can control it.
Some of these days the farmers, notwithstanding their quiet and lack of talk, will be aroused, and then there will be a quiet, but none the less effective, revolution in conditions, and the big combinations, directed by unscrupulous and dishonest men, will, when they have picked themselves up and got their scattered senses together, realize that it was the farmers that hit them. –The Northwest Review
From the Archives of Tom Giessel, Larned, Kansas
