fluctuating. It was
still distracted by memories of the dead past and uncertain as to the
trend of the future.

THE CURRENCY QUESTION

Nevertheless these years of muddled politics and nebulous issues proved
to be a period in which social forces were gathering for the great
campaign of 1896. Except for three new features--the railways, the
trusts, and the trade unions--the subjects of debate among the people
were the same as those that had engaged their attention since the
foundation of the republic: the currency, the national debt, banking,
the tariff, and taxation.

=Debtors and the Fall in Prices.=--For many reasons the currency
question occupied the center of interest. As of old, the farmers and
planters of the West and South were heavily in debt to the East for
borrowed money secured by farm mortgages; and they counted upon the sale
of cotton, corn, wheat, and hogs to meet interest and principal when
due. During the war, the Western farmers had been able to dispose of
their produce at high prices and thus discharge their debts with
comparative ease; but after the war prices declined. Wheat that sold at
two dollars a bushel in 1865 brought sixty-four cents twenty years
later. The meaning of this for the farmers in debt--and nearly
three-fourths of them were in that class--can be shown by a single
illustration. A thousand-dollar mortgage on a Western farm could be paid
off by five hundred bushels of wheat when prices were high; whereas it
took about fifteen hundred bushels to pay the same debt when wheat was
at the bottom of the scale. For the farmer, it must be remembered, wheat
was the measure of his labor, the product of his toil under the summer
sun; and in its price he found the test of his prosperity.

=Creditors and Falling Prices.=--To the bondholders or creditors, on the
other hand, falling prices were clear gain. If a fifty-dollar coupon on
a bond bought seventy or eighty bushels of wheat instead of twenty or
thirty, the advantage to the owner of the coupon was obvious. Moreover
the advantage seemed to him entirely just. Creditors had suffered heavy
losses when the Civil War carried prices skyward while the interest
rates on their old bonds remained stationary. For example, if a man had
a $1000 bond issued before 1860 and paying interest at five per cent, he
received fifty dollars a year from it. Before the war each dollar would
buy a bushel of wheat; in 1865 it would only buy half a bushel. When
pri