rong in capital and skilful
in combination and chicanery, has drained the agricultural regions,
until agriculture,[4] toil, and poverty, are closely associated,
while urban wealth displays its ostentatious ease, and farmers are
driven by the million into a desperate political struggle for
self-protection.

[4] It is necessary to illustrate this by a few decisive
facts which have not been made familiar to the
majority of readers, as farmers' interests have
received very little consideration in the East. The
financial policy of the general government ever
controlled by capital against labor, has been the most
gigantic imposition by financial jugglery that history
has recorded, and has been effected chiefly by
manipulation and contraction of the currency to make
debts more oppressive, and during the war by
depreciating the people's money. After the war when
$500,000,000 were needed to compensate the destruction
of confederate money, a criminal contraction of
$500,000,000 dealt a crushing blow to the South, and to
the whole country. Let us look at it from the
standpoint of the largest body of laborers, the
farmers. A very intelligent Illinois farmer, Bert
Stewart, presents the case as follows, and if his data
are all correct, he has demonstrated a wholesale
robbery: The national debt at the end of the war was
about $2,800,000,000. What would it then have cost the
farmers to pay this debt? He estimates that it could
have been paid by 996,000,000 bushels of wheat; or
1,380,000,000 bushels of corn; or 10,000,000 bales of
cotton. But financial legislation has increased the
value of money (magnifying the debt), and decreased the
value of the products of labor, so that practically,
the debt has been increasing faster than it has been
paid; and, after paying nearly $2,000,000,000 of the
principal, and over $2,000,000,000 of interest, it will
cost more to pay the remaining third of the debt than
to have paid the whole at first. It would require
to-day, instead of 1,380,000,000, over 4,000,000,000
bushels of corn to pay the remaining third. This being
the case, it would seem that the payme