The farmers put in their crops, and then wanted to talk. The next item on the written schedule was labor, which, as had been foreseen, was exactly what the farmers wanted to discuss. The farmers were reasonable, and although they balked at the Boy Scouts, they did accept as a temporary relief the help of high-school and college boys. And then was unfolded. the plan which economists and farmers long ago agreed is the only possible solution of the farm-labor question. The farmer must somehow be allowed a larger percentage of the price the consumer pays for his product, so that he can pay adequate wages and get adequate help. If he is lucky, the farmer now gets thirty per cent. of the retail price; but he is seldom lucky in Fairfield County, owing to local causes in the New York market. So were the farmers skeptical of any plan to get them, of all the farmers in America, enough return from their crops to allow them to enter the labor market on a par with other employers of labor. For that alone is the solution of the farmlabor problem.

But the Fairfield County Association guaranteed at least a mighty effort toward solving it through the solving of the third problem on the list, marketing. A distribution system is to be worked out on permanent lines, perhaps with broad schedules of consumption statistics, which will allow for agreements among the farmers on planting, forestalling local gluts, and bringing every farmer his full return on all he plants. Central wholesale markets for the county are possible. There all the produce of the country will be sent, sold first at local prices for the full profit of the farmer, and when local. needs are filled, the balance will be shipped to New York.

The emergency achievements of the agricultural department started with the asparagus crop, which one bright week in May matured all at once, and seemed destined for the usual fate of the glut, the bottom of New York Bay. But the promise had been given to the farmers, and Mr. von Wettberg put advertisements in

newspapers that gave canning receipts and invited housewives to send in their orders. The telephone rang all day long for a week, and the farmers sold their abundant asparagus at the best prices they had known in years, and incidentally the best prices the housewives, from their point of view, had known in a similar period. Meanwhile 225,000 booklets of canning receipts, got out by the association, had been mailed by the county merchants with their May bills, and by these receipts spinach was dried out and put away, berries preserved without sugar, and every other green vegetable and fruit crop saved from wastage.

So the plan works out into emergency measures, and back into the great scheme again. The New England hardware merchant, a Yankee tradesman, is putting his wisdom at the command of the farmer, and with the aid of the farmer is bringing the New England housewife back to her old trade of "putting up" her own fruit and vegetables.

The other great phase of the Fairfield County plan is industrial organization. Two tremendous motives seemed to assure success. One was patriotism, the other a genuine fear of the specter of federalization.

New Englanders in spirit, not a single manufacturer has ever questioned that the entire manufacturing power of Fairfield County would and should be turned to the aid of the Government, no matter what the cost to them individually. As business men they realized that there is a real likelihood that American industries of all sorts will be commandeered, but they also knew that their own control of their factories, working to government specifications, would turn out a better product, in quicker time, at a lower cost. Organization they had seen at work in. remaking Bridgeport, solving social problems, laying substantial foundations for industrial permanence. They saw the new Fairfield County Association at work solving its agricultural problems, building a transportation plan, preparing effectively to protect them and their workers in peril

and disaster. They accepted the emergency provisions for the war, and gloried in the organized program back of the emergency. The great plan, which through coöperation seemed to them more splendid than anything conceived in this country before, looked to the distribution of the war load, so that the normal products of all the factories would be maintained in part through the war, and so that when the war ended, the factories of Fairfield County would perhaps be the first in all the world to switch back to the needs and the rewards of peace.

The idea was magnificent, and the plan was a plan that would work. The chart provides for a searching county survey of industries, divided into four heads, raw materials, plants, labor, and products, coördinating into a scheme which may be visualized as a double arrow, pointing first to conversion to war and second to conversion to peace. The double arrow is a single idea, not two. There is in the Fairfield County program no place for mere wasteful conversion to war emergencies, for in the very act of that conversion the change back to peace is provided for. If the ideal is realized, every enlargement of every plant will be made not merely with a view to getting out war orders, but also with a view to converting that increased capacity to some great peace industry predetermined and arranged from the first.

Part of this coöperation now in operation, is a plan of complete standardization of factory measurements. In the few months since we entered the war the association has made available for all factories of the county absolute standards for tools, dies, etc., something unheard of two years ago, when thousands of munitions for the Allies were thrown into the scrap-heap because of errors of hundredths of an inch in the gages. The county manufacturers have even gone so far as to designate one tool manufacturing company to make tools from the standards of any factory for any other factory for war or for peace machinery, and the association has secured the establishment of a

federal bureau of standards in that factory for the use of the whole district.

Coöperation rests on the elimination of all competition except that of quality and business organization. In this drawing together of men and industries to form the wall of resources behind the battle-lines America must learn the lesson that the failure of our competitor because of faults of ignorance which we could have corrected is our failure; for this ignorance is the real basis of all our economic waste. The labor problem is most subject to human frailty of all the problems of industry, since it deals not only with men and women at lathes and benches, but is more affected by human greed and human selfishness in employers. It takes a general strike to make employers admit labor is a collective problem, and coöperation lasts only over the strike. It is taking a great war to bring employers and employees to a realization that their relationships are the communities' very life, and that therefore the community has not only the right to be present at the solution of their problems, but has the inherent power to solve them. The labor problems of the Fairfield County factories, because of that inherent power, are to be solved under the direction of the county association.

Harry E. Harris, in charge of the industrial department, is, for instance, securing a very general adoption of the apprenticeship system, comparatively unknown heretofore. Under the direction of the association, also, the employers outside the munition-factories were able to get recognition in the draft-exemption regulations, and, perhaps greatest of all, the momentous question of the employment of women is being scientifically treated. The experience of Europe and Canada is being collated, and the advice of scientists of every sort called upon to determine what work women can do and cannot do, so that there will be no need for "experimenting" with women's lives before they are fitted into their factory jobs in Fairfield County.

When the organizer's finger ran down.

the list to transportation, the arterial system of the county plan was touched. Transportation includes shipping raw materials in and finished product out; it includes the caring for that farm crop which was promised a market; it means the movement of troops throughout the county; it means the making of civilian relief possible. The work was put into the hands of Herman C. Fleitman, a New York importer. He was not one of the organizers of the association, but a stranger who attended a meeting in Stamford, and offered his services in any capacity. He was the worker found after the job was laid out completely, and his success is in itself a justification of the well-made plan. Mr. Fleitman has set in motion plans for the using of coalbarges for return freights to New York, trolley lines for night freight transportation, and motor-trucks for opening up back-country roads and bringing the farms to the cities.

Motor transportation mobilization took two forms, one the organization of volunteered motor-cars and -trucks into companies of nine and battalions of twentyseven of the same make, with repair-cars and skilled mechanics for each battalion, and the other the hiring of motor-trucks for transportation overland, to handle the crops, to educate the public, and to create a powerful demand for road improvement that will help the development of the county.

The organization of the motor units was carried out with military thoroughness, and was safeguarded against false alarms by a direct line of responsibility. Owners of motor-cars and -trucks volunteered by hundreds. They are to be called out only for a few hours or a day in case of actual emergency. Another division of cars and trucks are those offered for longer periods at a low rental. With these will be made a test of gathering in the crops of the farmers by motortruck, over the up-county roads, an experiment which it is hoped will be so successful that private truck routes will be established on regular schedules to carry

farmers' supplies and crops from and to the railroads and the cities. The great plan calls for active development of all phases of motor transportation and dovetails transportation into not only the solution of agricultural questions, but those of the military and relief department as well.

In fact, so thoroughly efficient has the organization of the transportation department shown itself that when the sheriff of Fairfield County organized his deputies on a military basis to take the place of the militia, mustered into the Federal service, and of the Home Guard, detailed to the protection of important bridges, power plants, etc., he called in his official capacity for recognition of his force as part of the military division of the Fairfield County Association for the Mobilization of Resources, frankly counting on the transportation department to mobilize his men if needed, and on the association to judge of the emergencies which might call them.

Upon the transportation department depends much of the success of the big emergency relief plan of the relief and welfare department. The organization of this department is in the hands of a New York business executive whose home is in Stamford, Edward Sawyer. The emergency relief plan is worked out according to Red Cross regulations, but it becomes effective through the county organization. A bomb, an explosion, almost any factory disaster or wreck might assume terrible proportions in these Connecticut manufacturing towns. Under the relief plan, the doctors in each town are divided into groups (four, for instance, in Stamford), and nurses into an equal number of groups. Supplies are located and held in readiness, a trunk of surgical materials is in the office of the chief of police. When a call for aid comes, one doctor or health officer designated for each town judges the number of doctors, nurses, and emergency ambulances needed, and advises the head of the telephone company. A girl on the main switchboard is detailed to locate the

head of each unit of doctors and nurses, and then to clear her board for the calls of that doctor or nurse until his orders have reached every member of the unit. The transportation needed for doctors, supplies, and ambulances is assembled by the battalion train-master of the town in the same way, and, if necessary, military forces to control the situation. Every detail has been foreseen, and every contingency provided for, even down to the men and women who will go to halls, church parlors, and clubs, already selected, to lay cots and prepare operating-rooms.

But this is emergency work. Beyond it, in the relief and welfare department, lies a work vaster than that. This is the problem of bringing order out of the chaos of overlapping work of hundreds of patriotic service societies. Some effort toward solving this among national organizations is being made in Washington, but in Fairfield County there are well over a hundred different societies, thirtynine of them in Bridgeport alone.

Mr. Sawyer and his aids travel over the county, and in every village they are effecting, despite many genuine, if unworthy, difficulties, a coördination of work which will eliminate the overlapping of objectives, and will assign to each patriotic body the work which it alone will do. The local associations are actually submitting themselves to the county organization, strange as that may appear to those who know New England

village life, and it seems likely not only that the war emergency work will be done, and thoroughly done, in Fairfield County, but that the welfare work of peace, looking toward fields as broad as the life of the nation itself, will be organized as no such work has ever before been organized.

There are many inspiring moments as one goes from department to department, from results back to the great plan and its vast spaces of achievement, but perhaps none is more thrilling than this very prospect of the coördination of welfare work. Here is a monument that will stand. This Fairfield County plan, with its solid building, month by month, and year by year, will weld this great county, with its farms, its ugly factory cities, and its trim villages, into something yet finer, a community where community problems are solved within itself, where the absorption of hundreds of thousands of foreigners is carried to its logical conclusion of making them into Americans as well as workers for America; where the housing problem is solved as a whole, where no families shall be separated, but where the laboring element shall be actually part and parcel of the community; where, at last, those social barriers which deride the true spirit of our Americanism shall be broken down in great cities and in country towns. All this, and more, is a possibility if the welding of the units of relief organizations into harmonious collaboration under the great plan is possible.