as handled during this season. Thus did co-operative purchasing by
the farmers pass from experiment to a permanent place in their
activities.

Expansion was taking place in other directions also. In 1912 the
Company leased from the Canadian Pacific Railway a terminal elevator at
Fort William, capacity 2,500,000 bushels. A small cleaning elevator
was acquired at the same place and, with an eye to possible
developments at the Pacific Coast, a controlling interest in a small
terminal elevator in British Columbia was purchased. At Port Arthur,
on a six-hundred-foot lake frontage, a new elevator has just been built
with a storage capacity of 600,000 bushels.

So much for terminal facilities of this farmers' pioneer trading
organization. Now, what about the country elevators for government
control of which the farmers had campaigned so vigorously in the three
Prairie Provinces? As we have seen, the problem had been handled in
Saskatchewan along very different lines to the method adopted in
Manitoba. In Manitoba the 374 elevators, owned by the Provincial
Government and operated by the Provincial Elevator Commission, showed a
loss. It was even hinted in some quarters that the Manitoba Government
had no intention in the first place of operating at anything but a
loss. Whether or not there was any ground for these irreverent
suspicions, the fact remained that the Government elevator system in
Manitoba was beginning to assume the bulk of a snow-white elephant.
The Government, not entering the field as buyers, had tried to run the
elevators as a storage proposition solely. In 1910-11 the loss had
exceeded $84,000 and the year following was not much better. At last
the Government said in effect to the Grain Growers:

"We've lost money on this proposition. We tried it out to please you
farmers, but you're still dissatisfied. Try to run 'em yourselves!"

"We'll just do that," replied the farmers, although the Grain Growers'
Grain Company was not enthusiastic over the prospect of converting the
elevator failure into immediate financial success.

It was too much to expect. At many points the Government owned all the
elevators in sight. In some places there was too much elevator
accommodation for the district's volume of business. In certain cases
the elevators which had been sold to the Government were practically
discards to begin with. However, the need for improvement in the
service which the farmers were gettin