ally from the unlimited resources at their command."
Another editor wrote:

We find the following printed card on our desk: "The last report of the
Secretary of the Treasury shows the banks as loaning $1,970,022,687"!
Four times the amount of money there is to loan. Four interests in every
dollar! They are drawing from the people enough to run the National
Government. How long will it take them to gather in all the money of the
nation? This does not include the amounts loaned by state, private, and
savings banks. Add to this the billions of dollars of other loans and
think if it is any wonder times are hard. Will the American people never
wake up to the fact that they are being pauperized? Four people are
paying interest upon each dollar you have in your pocket--if you have
any. Wake up! Wake up!

Whatever the ultimate effects of an inflated and consequently
depreciated currency might be, the debtor class, to which a large
portion of the Western farmers belonged, would obviously benefit
immediately by the injection of large quantities of money into the
circulating medium. The purchasing power of money would be lower; hence
the farmer would receive more in dollars and cents and would be in a
better position to pay his standing debts. Whether or not the rise in
the prices of his products would be offset or more than offset by the
increased prices which he would have to pay for the things he purchased
would depend upon the relative rate at which different commodities
adjusted themselves to the new scale of money value. In the end,
of course, other things being equal, there would be a return of old
conditions; but the farmers did not look so far ahead. Hence it was
that less attention was paid to taxation, to railroad rates and
discriminations, to elevator companies, to grain gamblers, or to
corporations as such; and the main force of the agrarian movements from
1875 onward was exerted, first for an increased paper currency and then
for free silver.

CHAPTER VIII. THE FARMERS' ALLIANCE

The hope of welding the farmers into an organization which would enable
them to present a united front to their enemies and to work together for
the promotion of their interests--social, economic, and political--was
too alluring to be allowed to die out with the decline of the Patrons of
Husbandry. Farmers who had experienced the benefits of the Grange, even
though they had deserted it in its hour of trial, were easily induced
to