Mr. Calvin’s face lighted up. “That is precisely what I say in my speeches to the farmers. That’s our whole idea in a nutshell.”
“And yet the Trust produces milk more cheaply than could the independent dairymen?” Ernest queried.
“Why shouldn’t it, with the splendid organization and new machinery its large capital makes possible?”
“There is no discussion,” Ernest answered. “It certainly should, and, furthermore, it does.”
Mr. Calvin here launched out into a political speech in exposition of his views. He was warmly followed by a number of the others, and the cry of all was to destroy the trusts.
“Poor simple folk,” Ernest said to me in an undertone. “They see clearly as far as they see, but they see only to the ends of their noses.”
A little later he got the floor again, and in his characteristic way controlled it for the rest of the evening.
“I have listened carefully to all of you,” he began, “and I see plainly that you play the business game in the orthodox fashion. Life sums itself up to you in profits. You have a firm and abiding belief that you were created for the sole purpose of making profits. Only there is a hitch. In the midst of your own profit-making along comes the trust and takes your profits away from you. This is a dilemma that interferes somehow with the aim of creation, and the only way out, as it seems to you, is to destroy that which takes from you your profits.