ained upon the farms as tenants
after foreclosure. These are but the natural effects in reaction from
a tremendous boom." In eastern Kansas, where settlement was older, the
pressure of hard times was withstood with less difficulty. It was in
western Kansas, by the way, that Populism had its strongest following;
and, after the election of 1892, a movement to separate the State into
two commonwealths received serious consideration.

* G. T. Fairchild, Pol. Se. Q., vol. 11, p. 614.

Even more inexorable than the holder of the mortgage or his agent was
the tax collector. It was easy to demonstrate that the farmer, with
little or nothing but his land, his stock, and a meager outfit of
implements and furniture, all readily to be seen and assessed, paid
taxes higher in proportion to his ability to pay than did the business
man or the corporation. Although his equity in the land he owned might
be much less than its assessed value, he was not allowed to make any
deduction for mortgages. The revenue of the Federal Government was
raised wholly by indirect taxes levied principally upon articles of
common consumption; and the farmer and other people of small means paid
an undue share of the burden in the form of higher prices demanded for
commodities.

Low prices for his produce, further depressed by the rapacity of the
railroads and the other intermediaries between the producer and the
consumer, mortgages with high interest rates, and an inequitable system
of taxation formed the burden of the farmer's complaint during the last
two decades of the nineteenth century. These grievances and all sorts
of remedies proposed for them were discussed in farmers' gatherings,
in agricultural weeklies, even in city dailies, and ultimately in
legislative chambers. Investigations demonstrated that, even when
reduced to a minimum, the legitimate grounds for complaint were
extensive; and the resultant reports suggested a variety of remedies.
Generally, however, popular sentiment swung around again to the tack
it had taken in the late seventies: the real cure for all the evils was
more money. Wall Street and the national banks could suck the blood from
the western community because of their monopoly of the money supply.
According to one irate editor, "Few people are aware of the boundless
advantages that the national banks have under our present accursed
system. They have usurped the credit of the people and are fattening a
thousand-fold annu