ghty crop of wheat brings its possessor but fifty cents a bushel,
when cows are worth but fifteen dollars apiece, and good butter sells
for eight cents a pound, while thousands in the land are known to be
suffering because of the lack of these things, a leanness of
pocket-book results which the farmer may understand, but to which he
is not easily reconciled.

His eyes are open. The over-production theory explains nothing to him
while the mouths of a multitude go unfed; while the beef that he sold
for one and a half and two cents a pound on foot, retails in the
eastern market, when dressed, for from ten to eighteen cents a pound;
and while his corn and his wheat, at the other end of the line of
transportation, brings twice the price he received for it here. He is
able to put two and two together. He knows that primarily all wealth
comes from the soil, in response to the toil of himself and his
fellows. His eyes rest upon the 31,000 millionnaires of the land who
roll in wealth. He says, "I helped produce that. How did they get it?"
He knows that the money could not be had last fall to handle his grain
and that, in consequence, a ridiculously low price was offered him in
order to keep it off the market. He knows that a few men take
advantage of his necessities and dictate prices just at the time when
he must sell. He knows that railroads absorb nearly fifty per cent. of
crop values for transportation charges, in order to pay dividends on a
capitalization, fifty per cent. of which is fictitious, and that when
the laws forbid it the courts of the land step in and declare it
"reasonable compensation."

In a word, it does not take a very sharp farmer to see that although
hot winds, or murrain, or hog cholera increase the leanness of his
pocket-book, these things do not explain that irresistible and
invariable current which bears such a large portion of what he does
earn into the plethoric pocket-books of the few rich. The farmer has
become, perforce, a student of economics; and, although we may laugh
at some of the vagaries in which he indulges, a close study of the
situation and of his demands will probably show him to be about as
reasonable as those are who champion the present order of things.

If the symptoms of an unnatural and unnecessary agricultural
depression were confined to the Dakotas, and Kansas, and Nebraska, the
farmer student might be nonplussed in his investigations. He might be
led to consider his inexperi