ed as
to insure his salary and expenses; in fact, the whole history of these
early years represents the hardest kind of struggle against financial
difficulties. Later, Kelley wrote of this difficult period: "If all
great enterprises, to be permanent, must necessarily start from small
beginnings, our Order is all right. Its foundation was laid on SOLID
NOTHING--the rock of poverty--and there is no harder material." At times
the persistent secretary found himself unable even to buy postage for
his circular letters. His friends at Washington began to lose interest
in the work of an order with a treasury "so empty that a five-cent stamp
would need an introduction before it would feel at home in it." Their
only letters to Kelley during this trying time were written to remind
him of bills owed by the order. The total debt was not more than $150,
yet neither the Washington members nor Kelley could find funds to
liquidate it. "My dear brother," wrote Kelley to Ireland, "you must not
swear when the printer comes in.... When they come in to 'dun' ask them
to take a seat; light your pipe; lean back in a chair, and suggest to
them that some plan be adopted to bring in ten or twenty members, and
thus furnish funds to pay their bills." A note of $39, in the hands of
one Mr. Bean, caused the members in Washington further embarrassment at
this time and occasioned a gleam of humor in one of Kelley's letters.
Bean's calling on the men at Washington, he wrote, at least reminded
them of the absentee, and to be cursed by an old friend was better than
to be forgotten. "I suggest," he continued, "that Granges use black and
white BEANS for ballots."

In spite of all his difficulties, Kelley stubbornly continued his
endeavor and kept up the fiction of a powerful central order at the
capital by circulating photographs of the founders and letters which
spoke in glowing terms of the great national organization of the Patrons
of Husbandry. "It must be advertised as vigorously as if it were a
patent medicine," he said; and to that end he wrote articles for leading
agricultural papers, persuaded them to publish the constitution of the
Grange, and inserted from time to time press notices which kept the
organization before the public eye. In May, 1868, came the first fruits
of all this correspondence and advertisement--the establishment of a
Grange at Newton, Iowa. In September, the first permanent Grange in
Minnesota, the North Star Grange, was establ