he same terms. The tariff rates on American agricultural
products, placed in the acts as a matter of form, have, with minute
exceptions, been ineffective to favor farmers, as the shipments were
all outward and none inward, while heavy and effective rates were
placed on most things that the farmers had to buy.[2]

In part the explanation of the lack of legislation favoring farmers
is to be found in their small part and influence, as a class, in
political affairs, outside of minor executive offices in township and
county governments. In the state legislatures farmers are few relative
to their numbers in the community, and still fewer in either House in
Washington. Among the real exceptions to the otherwise fair record of
the farming class in this respect is the tax on oleomargarine and the
special favor accorded to farmers' associations in the Clayton Act. It
might be cynically said that the farmer has not been "sharp" enough
to get his share of the "good" things" that the business classes were
passing around in protective legislation. But farmers have, as has
every economic group, interests which may legitimately be the subject
of social legislation; whereas they have limited their attention to
their private affairs at home and have been prone to vote patiently
and proudly the "straight ticket" to elect business men and lawyers to
office.

Sec. 4. #Period of decaying agricultural prosperity#. Despite the facts
just stated, every campaign orator admits that there is no other
occupational class of the nation of greater importance to the nation
than the farmers, or more deserving of prosperity. Every other part
of the industrial organization of a nation is interrelated with
its agriculture. Great changes, in respect to growth of population,
immigration, exhaustion of natural resources, mechanical inventions,
scientific discovery, and many things more, have been occurring,
which have altered and, in some communities, have destroyed the very
foundations of agricultural enterprise in America since the close
of the Civil War in 1865. But the farmers have been left to struggle
individually with their individual difficulties, tho the outcome was
of the gravest portent to the whole social economy. Such was the case
in the period of agricultural depression from 1873 to about 1896.[3]
Multitudes of ancestral homesteads were then left behind by the last
farmer-descendant of the old line. No longer able to make a living on
the soil,