an
and of the manufacturer was almost as intense as their hostility to the
railroad magnate; quite naturally, therefore, the farmers attempted
to use their new organizations as a means of eliminating the one and
controlling the other. As in the parallel case of the railroads, the
farmers' animosity, though it was probably greater than the provocation
warranted, was not without grounds.

The middlemen--the commission merchants to whom the farmer sold his
produce and the retail dealers from whom he bought his supplies--did
undoubtedly make use of their opportunities to drive hard bargains. The
commission merchant had such facilities for storage and such knowledge
of market conditions that he frequently could take advantage of market
fluctuations to increase his profits. The farmer who sold his produce
at a low price and then saw it disposed of as a much higher figure was
naturally enraged, but he could devise no adequate remedy. Attempts to
regulate market conditions by creating an artificial shortage seldom
met with success. The slogan "Hold your hogs" was more effective as a
catchword than as an economic weapon. The retail dealers, no less than
the commission men, seemed to the farmer to be unjust in their dealings
with him. In the small agricultural communities there was practically no
competition. Even where there were several merchants in one town these
could, and frequently did, combine to fix prices which the farmer had
no alternative but to pay. What irked the farmer most in connection with
these "extortions" was that the middleman seemed to be a nonproducer,
a parasite who lived by chaining the agricultural classes of the wealth
which they produced. Even those farmers who recognized the middleman
as a necessity had little conception of the intricacy and value of his
service.

Against the manufacturer, too, the farmer had his grievances. He felt
that the system of patent rights for farm machinery resulted in unfair
prices--for was not this same machinery shipped to Europe and there sold
for less than the retail price in the United States? Any one could see
that the manufacturer must have been making more than reasonable profit
on domestic sales. Moreover, there were at this time many abuses of
patent rights. Patents about to expire were often extended through
political influence or renewed by means of slight changes which were
claimed to be improvements. A more serious defect in the patent
system was that new pa