creasing the volume
of currency in circulation and at the same time enabling the farmer to
borrow money at low rates of interest, this organization favored the
establishment of a land loan bureau operated by the Government. Legal
tender currency to the amount of $100,000,000 or more if necessary, was
to be placed at the disposal of this bureau for loans upon the security
of agricultural land in amounts not to exceed one-half the value of
the land and at an interest rate of two per cent per annum. These loans
might run for twenty years but were to be payable at any time at the
option of the borrower.

With two strong organizations assuming all the functions of political
parties, except the nomination of candidates, the stage was set in 1890
for a drama of unusual interest. One scene was laid in Washington, where
in the House and Senate and in the lobbies the sub-treasury scheme was
aired and argued. Lending their strength to the men from the mining
States, the Alliance men aided the passage of the Silver Purchase Act,
the nearest approach to free silver which Congress could be induced
to make. By the familiar practice of "log-rolling," the silverites
prevented the passage of the McKinley tariff bill until the
manufacturers of the East were willing to yield in part their objections
to silver legislation. But both the tariff and the silver bill seemed
to the angry farmers of the West mere bones thrown to the dog under the
table. They had demanded FREE silver and had secured a mere increase in
the amount to be purchased; they had called for a downward revision of
the duties upon manufactured products and had been given more or less
meaningless "protection" of their farm produce; they had insisted upon
adequate control of the trusts and had been presented with the Sherman
Act, a law which might or might not curb the monopolies under which they
believed themselves crushed. All the unrest which had been gathering
during the previous decade, all the venom which had been distilled by
fourteen cent corn and ten per cent interest, all the blind striving
to frustrate the industrial consolidation which the farmer did not
understand but feared and hated, found expression in the political
campaign of 1890.

The Alliance suited its political activities to local necessities.
In many of the Southern States, notably Florida, Georgia, and the
Carolinas, Alliance men took possession of the Democratic conventions
and forced both the incorp