Note 4 — THE TYRANNY OF ALL THE PEOPLE.

It is necessary to illustrate this by a few decisive facts which have not been made familiar to the majority of readers, as farmers’ interests have received very little consideration in the East. The financial policy of the general government ever controlled by capital against labor, has been the most gigantic imposition by financial jugglery that history has recorded, and has been effected chiefly by manipulation and contraction of the currency to make debts more oppressive, and during the war by depreciating the people’s money. After the war when $500,000,000 were needed to compensate the destruction of confederate money, a criminal contraction of $500,000,000 dealt a crushing blow to the South, and to the whole country. Let us look at it from the standpoint of the largest body of laborers, the farmers. A very intelligent Illinois farmer, Bert Stewart, presents the case as follows, and if his data are all correct, he has demonstrated a wholesale robbery: The national debt at the end of the war was about $2,800,000,000. What would it then have cost the farmers to pay this debt? He estimates that it could have been paid by 996,000,000 bushels of wheat; or 1,380,000,000 bushels of corn; or 10,000,000 bales of cotton. But financial legislation has increased the value of money (magnifying the debt), and decreased the value of the products of labor, so that practically, the debt has been increasing faster than it has been paid; and, after paying nearly $2,000,000,000 of the principal, and over $2,000,000,000 of interest, it will cost more to pay the remaining third of the debt than to have paid the whole at first. It would require to-day, instead of 1,380,000,000, over 4,000,000,000 bushels of corn to pay the remaining third. This being the case, it would seem that the payment of about four thousand millions during the last twenty-six years, leaving the debt substantially unpaid, was virtually a robbery of the commonwealth by corrupt or ignorant legislation. Mr. Stewart mentions also, that in one year the binding twine trust, by raising prices, drew $21,000,000 “from the farmers of the West to the sharpers of the East.” The reports of the State Board of Agriculture of Illinois show (what is a fair statement for the whole country) that during the last thirty years the corn crops of Illinois have for more than half the time brought less than the cost of their production; and taking the entire thirty years together, the losses so nearly balanced the profits that the average net profit of the thirty years has not exceeded seventeen cents an acre for each year, in the cultivation of over six millions of acres of corn. In the official report of Iowa also, it is stated “the general range of farm products have sold below cost of production, since 1885.” The official “Farm Statistics of Michigan,” just issued, tell the same sad story. It shows that the wheat crop of 1889 cost more than it sold for, the loss being $1,471,515. The entire loss on wheat, corn, and oats amounted to $9,226,510. Thus is agricultural labor crushed that millionnaires may grow. Hence it is that farmers are sinking under their burdens of mortgage indebtedness, paying seven per cent. or more, losing their farms, and often compelled to mortgage crops, tools, and stock. In the single year, 1887, 35,334 farm mortgages were recorded in Illinois, amounting to $37,040,770, and “nine million mortgaged homes” is the war-cry of the Farmers’ Alliance.