“By extortionate you mean large; yet you do not object to making large profits yourself? . . .  Surely not?”

And Mr. Asmunsen amiably confessed to the weakness.  There was one other man who was quizzed by Ernest at this juncture, a Mr. Calvin, who had once been a great dairy-owner.

“Some time ago you were fighting the Milk Trust,” Ernest said to him; “and now you are in Grange politics.* How did it happen?”

* Many efforts were made during this period to organize the perishing farmer class into a political party, the aim of which was destroy the trusts and corporations by drastic legislation.  All such attempts ended in failure.

“Oh, I haven’t quit the fight,” Mr. Calvin answered, and he looked belligerent enough.  “I’m fighting the Trust on the only field where it is possible to fight—­the political field.  Let me show you.  A few years ago we dairymen had everything our own way.”

“But you competed among yourselves?” Ernest interrupted.

“Yes, that was what kept the profits down.  We did try to organize, but independent dairymen always broke through us.  Then came the Milk Trust.”

“Financed by surplus capital from Standard Oil,"* Ernest said.

     * The first successful great trust—­almost a generation in
     advance of the rest.

“Yes,” Mr. Calvin acknowledged.  “But we did not know it at the time.  Its agents approached us with a club.  “Come in and be fat,” was their proposition, “or stay out and starve.”  Most of us came in.  Those that didn’t, starved.  Oh, it paid us . . . at first.  Milk was raised a cent a quart.  One-quarter of this cent came to us.  Three-quarters of it went to the Trust.  Then milk was raised another cent, only we didn’t get any of that cent.  Our complaints were useless.  The Trust was in control.  We discovered that we were pawns.  Finally, the additional quarter of a cent was denied us.  Then the Trust began to squeeze us out.  What could we do?  We were squeezed out.  There were no dairymen, only a Milk Trust.”

“But with milk two cents higher, I should think you could have competed,” Ernest suggested slyly.

“So we thought.  We tried it.”  Mr. Calvin paused a moment.  “It broke us.  The Trust could put milk upon the market more cheaply than we.  It could sell still at a slight profit when we were selling at actual loss.  I dropped fifty thousand dollars in that venture.  Most of us went bankrupt.* The dairymen were wiped out of existence.”

* Bankruptcy—­a peculiar institution that enabled an individual, who had failed in competitive industry, to forego paying his debts.  The effect was to ameliorate the too savage conditions of the fang-and-claw social struggle.

“So the Trust took your profits away from you,” Ernest said, “and you’ve gone into politics in order to legislate the Trust out of existence and get the profits back?”