THE GOOSE HANGS HIGH
Things went well with us that second season. Much of the novelty of
the undertaking had worn off but none of the enthusiasm and everyone
settled down to hard, steady work. The prizes were still a big
incentive and the hundred dollars in new bills which Holt continued
to exhibit in Moulton’s store window was still as much a center of
interest and excited curiosity as money in a museum. But there was more
a feeling of security and confidence than the year before. Our past
success was somewhat responsible for this, but the Pioneer Products
Company was more so. There seemed to be a feeling now that we were
on a solid business basis. The coöperation idea--the mere fact of
organization--and the sight of stock certificates made our members feel
more like real business men than ever before they had felt in their
lives. And that was good for them. It steadied them and made them take
their work more seriously.
That was a good season for crops. Our small stuff came along early and
did well. By the last of June we were shipping lettuce and radishes and
by the first week in July early peas. Of course hothouse stuff had been
in the market long before this but Burlington was able to quote prices
that furnished him a ready market. Not only were the prices right but
the produce was right. There isn’t much doubt but what stuff grown in a
normal way without being forced has certain qualities that you can’t
get in hothouse products. The longer I farm the more respect I have for
Nature as a business partner. She is always square and above board but
she is also a stern mistress in the matter of justice. You can’t ever
get something for nothing from her. She’ll beat you every time you try
it. If you try to hurry her well and good, you can, but you’ll pay for
your early stuff at cost of flavor. If you go in for flavor, well and
good, but you’ll pay for that at the cost of size. Let her alone and
she’ll balance things.
We shipped eight hundred dollars’ worth of produce the last week in
June and through July our shipment amounted to three thousand dollars
a week, jumping in August to five thousand dollars and over a week.
Holt appointed an assistant to see that everything submitted was up to
standard. This man had authority to discard anything offered, but any
farmer who felt that he was being discriminated against could submit
the refused article that night to Holt. It may be well to mention that
not a man disputed the first judgment that summer. As members of the
corporation they realized that it was as much to their interest as
anyone’s to preserve our standard.
Our motor truck was a great success, reducing our transportation
charges almost fifty per cent. Not only this, but as time went on we
found that at the same cost it would have paid for itself in the matter
of convenience alone. We reached the market earlier and were able to
make, as we did later in the season, two and three trips a day, so
always getting our stuff to the market fresh.
Early in September, when we began to get new potatoes and early
apples, our sales jumped to six thousand dollars a week. Some of this
we shipped by freight. Never before had anyone in our town, except
Dardoni, ever marketed his early apples. A few bushels would be
taken to the store but as a rule what couldn’t be made into pies or
eaten by the small boys were allowed to rot on the ground. As for
crab apples--and nearly every farm had at least one tree--what a few
housewives did not put up in jelly met the same fate. I’ve seen bushels
of plump red crabs rotting on the ground. But not this season. In
the first place, Ruth all winter had urged the wives to put up more
preserves and the result was marked. Farmers had to get up early to get
ahead of their wives and gather any to send to town, but they found a
ready market for all they could send. I reckoned as clear profit to the
village every apple sent and the total amounted to a good many dollars.
For that matter you could reckon as clear profit about all the garden
stuff we sent for it’s certain it represented money which until now had
not been coming in. Potatoes and beans were all that had ever found
their way to market until now. When I look back I wonder how these
people ever lived on what they raised. In any real sense they didn’t
and what was true of our town is true to-day of a hundred other towns
in New England. You can find conditions of poverty right out under
God’s blue sky that would make your hardened settlement worker shudder
with horror.
Everything went well with us that second season as I said, and for that
reason it isn’t particularly interesting to me. On the first of October
we found that we had done a business of sixty-seven thousand eight
hundred dollars. In round figures this left after deducting commission
and expenses sixty thousand dollars. Out of this we declared a ten per
cent. dividend to stockholders, which amounted to six thousand dollars.
Three thousand more, or one dollar a share, we put aside into our
reserve fund. This left fifty-one thousand dollars to be distributed
on the basis of the amount of produce turned in. We had that year four
hundred and twenty-one members which made our net profits figure up per
capita a little over one hundred and twenty dollars.
Now it’s impossible for anyone to figure on whether that was a fair
return for the amount of capital invested in our plant or not. In
the first place that doesn’t by any means represent the value of our
produce. You must take into account the amount consumed by our home
market, the amount in hay and corn and potatoes and beans and what
not which we kept on hand for winter consumption and a hundred other
things. And besides--and this is something I want to emphasize over
and over again--if you could figure the total it would all be beside
the point. The fact which counted with us wasn’t whether or not we
were getting full value from our plant as yet. We weren’t, and we knew
it. The point was that we were getting something where before we got
nothing. If we hadn’t shipped five thousand dollars’ worth of produce
that second season we should have called our enterprise a success. We
had waked up! We were trying! We were using our opportunities! Our old
men were interested and our younger men enthusiastic and our women were
alive.
In looking back--and I don’t have to look back very far--I realize more
than ever that the Pioneer Products Company, which expresses the result
of our labors in dollars and cents, is by no means as important even
now as the Pioneer Club which expresses itself principally in pleasant
memories. The Pioneer Products Company is making us secure with modest
bank accounts, but it is the Pioneer Club which has made us Sam and
Josh and Frank and Bill to one another, and our wives Sam’s wife and
Josh’s wife and Frank’s wife and Bill’s wife. It’s the Pioneer Club
that has made us glad we’re living even if it’s the P. P. C. that has
made it possible for us to live. It’s the Pioneer Club that has made
our town dear to us and has made us proud that we live here. It’s the
Pioneer Club that is the heart of us through the long winter months,
though we are busier then than we used to be. And it’s the Pioneer Club
again that is keeping us sane and healthy in our prosperity.
We are becoming better pioneers every year, though there are people
who think we are going back. We don’t care an awful lot about electric
lights and cement sidewalks as some of our progressive neighbors do.
We have the best streets within fifty miles of us and we are content
to walk in them or in footpaths along the sides. We get along very
well with kerosene lamps and on a pinch can use candles. We have good
schools and in them are using some methods copied from our Southern
neighbors. We try as far as possible to teach arithmetic and farming
together, reading and farming together, geography and farming together.
It’s just as good exercise we find for our young folks to figure out
how much five bushels of potatoes at a dollar ten a bushel will amount
to as it is for them to figure out how much five times one, decimal,
one and a cipher is. It’s just as easy for them to learn to read by
reading about flowers and simple gardening as it is about how the cat
caught the rat. It’s just as interesting for them to learn the physical
geography of the world, not as a separate study, but as part of their
dry-as-bones boundary statistics.
We are encouraging athletics in the schools. We are backing the school
teams with our attendance at their games and our applause. It’s a fact
that the average country boy needs gymnasium work more than the average
city boy. He needs the training, the drill and routine work.
We are teaching our girls to cook and sew. We are teaching them to
cook and sew economically. Both our women and our girls were getting
into the baker shop habit. When we started in we were buying city-made
bread. Think of it, in the country of home-made bread, where we have
both material and time! We don’t buy much baker stuff now.
We don’t buy as much patent medicine as we did. In the first place,
there isn’t a store in town--not even the drug store--which carries it
any more. A man wouldn’t dare. If you want any of the stuff you have
to send to town for it, and while this is still being done no one lets
anyone know he’s doing it. Those with the habit get it and swallow it
the way they do their rum and most of them know pretty well that this
is all it is.
A sad event, which was at the same time a mighty good thing for our
town, was the death of Dr. Wentworth. “Doc” Wentworth as he was
known to everybody, had been here forty years. He was a big-hearted,
well-meaning type of family physician, but the amount of morphine he
prescribed would have disgraced Chinatown. It was his one antidote for
pain and he’d give it for a toothache. He gave it to man, woman and
child. Half the children in town took paregoric from the time they
were born until they were old enough to take straight morphine. It was
wicked. I went to one of the big medical schools and had a talk with
the Dean and recommended this village as a promising field for some
good young physician. The result was that a young man settled among
us of whom we have grown very fond. He is with us heart and soul in
preventing disease instead of fostering it.
We don’t own as many automobiles as some of our neighbors, but we have
some good horses--good work horses and good driving horses. I hope
to see better stock every year. I’ve a two year old I wouldn’t swap
to-day for the finest automobile ever manufactured. Our annual fair
is developing more and more along the lines of the old-time fair. We
are exhibiting more horses and cows and pigs and chickens because we
have some now worth exhibiting. We have developed quite a business of
selling off some of our surplus stock at this time. We find that the
neighboring towns wait for this event to select their breeders.
To go back to the Pioneer Products Company for a moment I may say
that our business has increased steadily every year. Some things we
have dropped because we find no further need of them. For instance
the company owns no more breeding stock. Our more prosperous members
conduct that end of the business themselves. We have, however, bought a
store house.
We are planning a new experiment. We found that a surprising lot of our
trade was among my old Little Italy friends. They became permanent
customers. As time has gone on we have also developed a regular
clientele outside of these--people who know the Pioneer Products
Company by name. Our scheme for next season is to put up a family
hamper to be delivered regularly through the season. This will contain
enough of the new vegetables to last a family a week. We divide our
produce into firsts and seconds and deliver the firsts to those who
can afford to pay a little more. The seconds will go mostly to Little
Italy. The latter will be good vegetables--fresh and sound, differing
from the firsts only in size. Burlington is to have charge of the
distribution on his usual commission basis. He is our manager now, by
the way, paying his salary out of his commission. This method will give
us a steadier market.
Now about our experiment in raising our own meat. That, too, has been
a fair success. The local butcher fought us for a little while but his
fight was hopeless. Understand, there was no attempt to boycott him or
anything of that sort, but we were most of us raising our own poultry
and pork and besides that we weren’t eating as much meat as we did.
Still there was some demand chiefly for beef. We made a proposition
to the man; that we turn in to him what meats we produced for the local
market and that he handle them on a basis of ten per cent. net profit.
He thought it over for a little while and then accepted. He has made a
good thing out of it and so have we.
I don’t want anyone to get the idea that our town is any Utopia. It
isn’t. It is nothing but a steady, prosperous farming community where
everybody is a hard worker. We aren’t doing half of what we might, but
our satisfaction comes in knowing we are doing more than we did. As
the years go by we hope to do more. There isn’t any reason I can see
why as a town we shouldn’t be in the position of any well-conducted
city business increasing our efficiency and with that our profits.
Real estate has almost doubled here, and this hasn’t been a fictitious
doubling. It is based on what land is worth to the investor who becomes
one of us and uses his land intelligently. No one can buy land in our
town, loaf on it and share our prosperity. We aren’t dividing any
profits except among those of us who earn them.
People have come to our town and tried to locate the secret of our
modest success in our land, in the coöperative idea, in our favorable
position to the market, in just our bull luck. Most of these men and
women haven’t sense enough to be worth bothering with. I haven’t
much patience with those who look to find the solution of all our
difficulties in some arbitrary system that doesn’t take the individual
into account. But now and then comes along a man who is in earnest.
Then I take him around and introduce him to Josh Chase. He sees a
long-legged, thin-faced fellow with skin as bronze as a skipper’s. Then
Josh takes the visitor over his ten acres of land with the pride of a
king. He shows him a new barn and all his carefully cared for farming
implements. He takes him into a modest story and a half white house and
introduces him to Mrs. Josh and a couple of rosy-cheeked children. With
half an eye the man can see that here is prosperity of the best kind.
“Well?” the man is apt to ask me.
“He isn’t afraid of the rain any more,” I say.
“Well?”
“That’s all. It means he isn’t afraid of work. He’s up at daybreak
every morning in the year and his work isn’t done till dark. But you
wouldn’t pick him out as a slave, would you? He doesn’t look like a
poor downtrodden savage, does he? He’s a man with a hoe all right but
is he making any bid for your sympathy?”
“That’s because your coöperative idea--”
“The company would have failed the second year if Josh had been
dependent upon that idea and not the idea upon him. No, sir, that man
came over in the Mayflower but he didn’t land till about five years
ago. If you don’t believe it I’ll show you another man who came over a
little earlier and who isn’t a member of our company because he doesn’t
need even that help.”
Then I take him round and introduce him to Dardoni.
He meets the smiling black-haired Italian and sees the latter’s busy
acres and meets another type of pioneer.
If, after this, the investigator is of a mind that prosperity is so
common hereabout that anyone can succeed, then I introduce him to the
awful example. That’s Hadley.
Poor old Hadley--even he confided in me the other day that if he felt
real pert next spring he thought he’d put that patch back of his house
into potatoes.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.