produced, and the most important; for, in spite of its egotistical cities,
the United States is still a farm-based nation.

There could be no cloth-mills without the wool and cotton of the farm; no
sugar factories without beets; no flour-mills without wheat; no
beef-packing industry without cattle. The real business that is now
swinging the whole nation ahead is not the ping-pong traffic of the Stock
Exchanges, but the steady output of twenty millions a day from the fields
and barn-yards. If this farm output were to be cut off, the towering
skyscrapers would fall and the gay palace-hotels would be as desolate as
the temple of Thebes.

The brain-working farmer is the man behind prosperity. That is the Big
Fact of recent American history. It is he who pays the bills and holds up
the national structure in the whirlwind hour of panic. Last year, for
instance, while banks were tumbling, the non-hysterical farmer was quietly
gathering in a crop that was worth three times all the bank capital in the
United States; and since 1902 he and his soil have produced as much new
wealth as would support Uncle Sam, at his present rate of living, for
fifty years.

What was called "McKinley Prosperity" was really created by the
agricultural boom of 1897. There had been a general crop failure in
Europe, and the price of wheat had soared above a dollar a bushel. Other
nations paid us twelve hundred millions for farm products; and this
unparalleled inpouring of foreign money made us the richest and busiest
nation in the world.

The supreme fact about the American Farmer is that he has always been just
as intelligent and important as anyone else in the Republic. He put
fourteen of his sons in the White House; and he did his full share of the
working and fighting and thinking and inventing, all the way down from
George Washington to James Wilson.

He climbed up by self-help. He got no rebates, nor franchises, nor
subsidies. The free land that was given him was worthless until he took
it; and he has all along been more hindered than helped by the meddling of
public officials.

His best friend has been the maker of farm-machinery. But this is a family
matter. Four-fifths of the Harvester Kings were farmers' sons; and the
biggest harvester factory is only a development of the small workshop that
always stood beside the barn. There are no two men who are more closely
linked together by the ties of blood and business than the farmer and the