Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III EXTENT OF THE FIELD " The Grange is where the future is grown and raised," said the mayor of a far north city when he welcomed the State Grange to its midst. It is a good omen when men entirely outside the range of its activities thus recognize in the Order its larger aims and prospective influence on public sentiments and events. Skilled specialists might well be daunted by the bigness of the Grange field as it is laid out before the local workers in the four main divisions of Grange effort: the financial, the legislative, the educational, and the social; and yet here are already busy, burdened housewives and farm men undertaking the officering of these local organizations without financial return and often at great sacrifice of strength and convenience to themselves. Many of them, new to their offices, do not comprehend the far stretches of the organization; but most of them do feel their own lack of experience and training, and all of them have joined because they appreciate in a greater or less degree their need of contact with others engaged in similar volunteer rural service. COUNTY, STATE, AND NATIONAL HOBIZONS However, the workers in Subordinate Granges do not stand alone. Theirs is but the first in a chain oforganizations, each link of which lifts them to a wider outlook. Next above the Subordinate is the county or Pomona Grange, and beyond that lie the state and national bodies. To these latter the Subordinate and county organizations are bound by means of delegates and by state and national publications. Public questions and movements of the widest range are thus brought into intimate relations with every local Grange, and its opinions, if arrived at, are finally embodied in the national decision. Because of the opportunities for open debate which ...