ession of the National Grange, the temporary organization of
government clerks was replaced by a permanent corporation, officered
by farmers. Kelley was reelected Secretary; Dudley W. Adams of Iowa
was made Master; and William Saunders, erstwhile Master of the National
Grange, D. Wyatt Aiken of South Carolina, and E. R. Shankland of Iowa
were elected to the executive committee. The substitution of alert and
eager workers, already experienced in organizing Granges, for the dead
wood of the Washington bureaucrats gave the order a fresh impetus to
growth. From the spring of 1873 to the following spring the number of
granges more than quadrupled, and the increase again centered mainly in
the Middle West.

By the end of 1873 the Grange had penetrated all but four
States--Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Nevada--and there were
thirty-two state Granges in existence. The movement was now well
defined and national in scope, so that the seventh annual session of
the National Grange, which took place in St. Louis in February, 1874,
attracted much interest and comment. Thirty-three men and twelve women
attended the meetings, representing thirty-two state and territorial
Granges and about half a million members. Their most important act was
the adoption of the "Declaration of Purposes of the National Grange,"
subscribed to then and now as the platform of the Patrons and copied
with minor modifications by many later agricultural organizations in the
United States. The general purpose of the Patrons was "to labor for the
good of our Order, our Country, and Mankind." This altruistic ideal
was to find practical application in efforts to enhance the comfort and
attractions of homes, to maintain the laws, to advance agricultural and
industrial education, to diversify crops, to systematize farm work, to
establish cooperative buying and selling, to suppress personal, local,
sectional, and national prejudices, and to discountenance "the
credit system, the fashion system, and every other system tending
to prodigality and bankruptcy." As to business, the Patrons declared
themselves enemies not of capital but of the tyranny of monopolies,
not of railroads but of their high freight tariffs and monopoly of
transportation. In politics, too, they maintained a rather nice balance:
the Grange was not to be a political or party organization, but its
members were to perform their political duties as individual citizens.

It could hardly be exp