into the good thing.  What I would like very much to be shown, therefore, is a method of cooeperation which is not a method of combination.  Not that the two words are mutually exclusive, but we have come to have a special meaning attached to the word “combination.”  Most of our combinations have a safety lock, and you have to know the combination to get in.  I want to know how these cooeperative methods can be adopted for the benefit of everybody who wants to use them, and I say frankly if I can be shown that, I am for them.  If I cannot be shown that, I am against them.  I hasten to add that I hopefully expect I can be shown that.

You, as I have just now intimated, probably cannot show it to me offhand, but by the methods which you have the means of using you certainly ought to be able to throw a vast deal of light on the subject.  Because the minute you ask the small merchant, the small banker, the country man, how he looks upon these things and how he thinks they ought to be arranged in order that he can use them, if he is like some of the men in country districts whom I know, he will turn out to have had a good deal of thought upon that subject and to be able to make some very interesting suggestions whose intelligence and comprehensiveness will surprise some city gentlemen who think that only the cities understand the business of the country.  As a matter of fact, you do not have time to think in a city.  It takes time to think.  You can get what you call opinions by contagion in a city and get them very quickly, but you do not always know where the germ came from.  And you have no scientific laboratory method by which to determine whether it is a good germ or a bad germ.

There are thinking spaces in this country, and some of the thinking done is very solid thinking indeed, the thinking of the sort of men that we all love best, who think for themselves, who do not see things as they are told to see them, but look at them and see them independently; who, if they are told they are white when they are black, plainly say that they are black—­men with eyes and with a courage back of those eyes to tell what they see.  The country is full of those men.  They have been singularly reticent sometimes, singularly silent, but the country is full of them.  And what I rejoice in is that you have called them into the ranks.  For your methods are bound to be democratic in spite of you.  I do not mean democratic with a big “D,” though I have a private conviction that you cannot be democratic with a small “d” long without becoming democratic with a big “D.”  Still that is just between ourselves.  The point is that when we have a consensus of opinion, when we have this common counsel, then the legislative processes of this Government will be infinitely illuminated.