r redress, the farmers
soon turned to the Grange as the weapon ready at hand to combat the
forces which they believed were conspiring to crush them. In 1872 began
the real spread of the order. Where the Grange had previously reckoned
in terms of hundreds of new lodges, it now began to speak of thousands.
State Granges were established in States where the year before the
organization had obtained but a precarious foothold; pioneer local
Granges invaded regions which hitherto had been impenetrable. Although
the only States which were thoroughly organized were Iowa, Minnesota,
South Carolina, and Mississippi, the rapid spread of the order into
other States and its intensive growth in regions so far apart gave
promise of its ultimate development into a national movement.

This development was, to be sure, not without opposition. When the
Grangers began to speak of their function in terms of business and
political cooperation, the forces against which they were uniting
took alarm. The commission men and local merchants of the South were
especially apprehensive and, it is said, sometimes foreclosed the
mortgages of planters who were so independent as to join the order. But
here, as elsewhere, persecution defeated its own end; the opposition of
their enemies convinced the farmers of the merits of the Grange.

In the East, several circumstances retarded the movement. In the first
place, the Eastern farmer had for some time felt the Western farmer to
be his serious rival. The Westerner had larger acreage and larger yields
from his virgin soil than the Easterner from his smaller tracts of
well-nigh exhausted land. What crops the latter did produce he must sell
in competition with the Western crops, and he was not eager to lower
freight charges for his competitor. A second deterrent to the growth
of the order in the East was the organization of two Granges among the
commission men and the grain dealers of Boston and New York, under
the aegis of that clause of the constitution which declared any person
interested in agriculture to be eligible to membership in the order.
Though the storm of protest which arose all over the country against
this betrayal to the enemy resulted in the revoking of the charters for
these Granges, the Eastern farmer did not soon forget the incident.

The year 1873 is important in the annals of the Grange because it marks
the retirement of the "founders" from power. In January of that year, at
the sixth s