e necessary limits of this article. We shall be
content to undeceive, if possible, those of our readers who have been
charging that the platform is indefinite.

One of the chief recommendations of the Independent platform, to the
voters of the West, was its brevity and definiteness, refreshing
qualities in the minds of a people who had been accustomed for years
to the platitudes and straddles of the old parties. Most of the
Independent county and State platforms could be summed up under three
heads, money, transportation, land. They declare in favor of a full
legal tender currency to come direct from the government to the
people, in volume sufficient to meet the demands of business; the
government ownership and control of railroads and homes for the
American millions. The main planks were summarized in the flaring
posters which announced the great rallies of the party last fall.
"Money at Cost! Transportation at Cost!" These were the headlines
which everywhere caught the public eye, and drew the crowds. Opponents
saw in these advertisements traces of a demagogue's hand. If it is
demagogism to awaken curiosity, arouse thought, and in a terse
sentence to express the party faith, then are the Independent leaders
guilty of it. But whether guilty or not, these two expressions have
awakened echoes that will not cease reverberating until our ideas and
systems of finance and transportation are quite revolutionized. As we
are not proposing here to discuss the wisdom of the farmer's demands,
we need waste no time on the land and transportation questions. So
much has been written on these questions, and the dividing line
between disputants is so clearly drawn, and farmers have settled down
so decidedly on one side of that line, that they are no longer open to
the charge of juggling with words when they declare in favor of
"homes" and "transportation at cost."

With the money question it is different. "Money at cost" is one of
those essences of thought which will bear analysis. We desire to show
that with the farmer's party it means but one thing,--that it is a
declaration of war with the piratical system of the present. "Money
at cost" is a sentiment and conviction which has grown up in the minds
of the producing and laboring classes of this country out of a deep
sense of the injury done them during the last quarter of a century,
and a pretty clear conception of the nature of money and the duty of
government.

Money, they say,