kind of struggle against financial difficulties. Later, Kelley
wrote of this difficult period: "If all great enterprises, to be
permanent, must necessarily start from small beginnings, our
Order is all right. Its foundation was laid on SOLID NOTHING--the
rock of poverty--and there is no harder material." At times the
persistent secretary found himself unable even to buy postage for
his circular letters. His friends at Washington began to lose
interest in the work of an order with a treasury "so empty that a
five-cent stamp would need an introduction before it would feel
at home in it." Their only letters to Kelley during this trying
time were written to remind him of bills owed by the order. The
total debt was not more than $150, yet neither the Washington
members nor Kelley could find funds to liquidate it. "My dear
brother," wrote Kelley to Ireland, "you must not swear when the
printer comes in . . . . When they come in to 'dun' ask them to
take a seat; light your pipe; lean back in a chair, and suggest
to them that some plan be adopted to bring in ten or twenty
members, and thus furnish funds to pay their bills." A note of
$39, in the hands of one Mr. Bean, caused the members in
Washington further embarrassment at this time and occasioned a
gleam of humor in one of Kelley's letters. Bean's calling on the
men at Washington, he wrote, at least reminded them of the
absentee, and to be cursed by an old friend was better than to be
forgotten. "I suggest," he continued, "that Granges use black and
white BEANS for ballots."

In spite of all his difficulties, Kelley stubbornly continued his
endeavor and kept up the fiction of a powerful central order at
the capital by circulating photographs of the founders and
letters which spoke in glowing terms of the great national