engendered by the
economic and political conditions of the times. The Greenback movement
was ephemeral. Failing to solve the problem of agricultural depression,
it passed away as had the Granger movement before it; but the greater
farmers' movement of which both were a part went on.

CHAPTER VII. THE PLIGHT OF THE FARMER

An English observer of agricultural conditions in 1893 finds that
agricultural unrest was not peculiar to the United States in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, but existed in all the more advanced
countries of the world:

"Almost everywhere, certainly in England, France, Germany, Italy,
Scandinavia, and the United States, the agriculturists, formerly so
instinctively conservative, are becoming fiercely discontented, declare
they gained less by civilization than the rest of the community, and
are looking about for remedies of a drastic nature. In England they are
hoping for aid from councils of all kinds; in France they have put
on protective duties which have been increased in vain twice over; in
Germany they put on and relaxed similar duties and are screaming for
them again; in Scandinavia Denmark more particularly--they limit the
aggregation of land; and in the United States they create organizations
like the Grangers, the Farmers' Leagues, and the Populists."*

*The Spectator, Vol. LXX, p. 247.

It is to general causes, indeed, that one must turn before trying to
find the local circumstances which aggravated the unrest in the United
States, or at least appeared to do so. The application of power--first
steam, then electricity--to machinery had not only vastly increased
the productivity of mankind but had stimulated invention to still wider
activity and lengthened the distance between man and that gaunt specter
of famine which had dogged his footsteps from the beginning. With a
constantly, growing supply of the things necessary for the maintenance
of life, population increased tremendously: England, which a few
centuries before had been overcrowded with fewer than four million'
people, was now more bountifully feeding and clothing forty millions.
Perhaps, all in all, mankind was better off than it had ever been
before; yet different groups maintained unequal progress. The tillers
of the soil as a whole remained more nearly in their primitive condition
than did the dwellers of the city. The farmer, it is true, produced a
greater yield of crops, was surrounded by more comforts,