"Do you know that a few men, comparatively, have almost changed the
nature of the country and village population? No, you don't, but
you'll learn of it some day through some magazine writer who gathers
up his points in the way I have. Time was when not one farmer in ten
in the land locked his house or barn at night. Now ninety out of a
hundred do it. When a stranger came along they welcomed him. When a
man talked with them they accepted his statement. What they saw in the
newspapers they believed without cavil. Well, they have got over all
this. The patent medicine faker, the mine exploiter, the bucketshop
man and the hundreds of other swindlers have destroyed the confidence
of the farmer and villager in human nature. They have been bitten so
often and so hard that they come to doubt if such a thing as honesty
exists. They won't take a stranger's word for anything. They have got
through believing that there is an honest advertiser. They have even
become distrustful of each other. It has become the hardest kind of
work to sell a windmill, piano or other articles direct.