platform, the delegates of New York filing out of the great hall in protest and amidst the jeers of Western and Southern delegates alike. It was a demonstration of the farmers on the war-path: the last great fight the farmers have ever staged, the last they are likely to stage. They then composed seventy-five per cent of the people of the country.

The Republicans now assumed for the first time positive championship of all the privileged groups, toying a little with free silver and talking loudly about the value of sound money. Their managers raised unprecedented sums of campaign money; they enlisted the representatives of the great companies in their earnest "campaign of education," Mark Hanna the chairman of the Republican national committee. No accounting has ever been made of the cost of the first great fight against the farmers. The Republicans reminded the country that Bryan was too young to be trusted in the Presidency; he was ill-informed as to the intricacies of life and history. That was not the reason he was hated, which history has tended to confirm. Frightened conservatives reopened the ancient war on the South, the socalled "bloody shirt" waved on platforms all over the West. It was too much for Ohio and Iowa farmers; their hatreds, rather than their interests, swung them back into the "party of Abraham Lincoln." The Boy Orator was defeated. But there was to be another war!

23

The little war with Spain, the incipient imperialism of McKinley, Roosevelt and Taft, the hastening military preparations all over the

world, led to moderate improvement in the price of wheat, corn, pigs and beef; farmers, still ill-educated in the affairs of the world and less militant than they had been in the days of Jackson, accepted the dogma that the party in power is responsible for good times. They came to think that the Republicans, like the Kaiser in Berlin, had an understanding with God Almighty. But in July and August, 1914, the Germans, the Austrians and the Russians started the flames of the greatest of all wars. It was not long before pigs sold at fabulous prices and cotton, after a short depression, rose to values not known since the close of the Civil War. Beef and flour were rushed from the Middle West to the great, red caldron of war. Cities grown great under the ægis of tariffs, of combinations of railways, of associations of industrial corporations and of banking consolidations-all drawing many millions of immigrants from Europe, millions of farmers' sons, into their hustling east and west sides—were now ready to lend a mighty hand, which withheld, would surely have insured the success of the German program. Thus the undemocratic powers of the United States were about to become the saviors of whatever democracy there was in Europe! But the farmers were prosperous. Their very prosperity blinded their vision. Business men were more prosperous and probably more blinded still to the real needs of the world: farmers in Fords, business men in Packards, all hastening hither and thither, filling the roads with reckless drivers and crowding pedestrians off the highways-amazing prosperity.

Would it last? Four billions of

American debts to Europeans were quickly paid in high-priced wheat or beef or shells and guns for the fields of battle. Other billions were soon loaned to England, France and Italy; hundreds of thousands of Americans angry that as many billions were not loaned to Germany. A great body of Americans would have joined England at the start; another great body would have joined the Germans; and some millions of Irishmen were almost willing to see their adopted country beaten if England could be ruined. Slowly a Democratic President came to think that the cause of democracy in the United States was bound up with the cause of the enemies of Germany, the slaughter of five hundred thousand Frenchmen at Verdun reminding men of the terrors of war under modern conditions. Unable to bring the powers to negotiate on terms of mutual concessions, Woodrow Wilson slowly led the country into the conflict, a war for democracy—a great army of Americans making ready to return to their ancient homes in the hope of teaching the world a better way. It was 1917.

The price of wheat rose to two and a half dollars a bushel, farmers angry that they did not receive three dollars. Cotton rose almost to forty cents a pound, Southern farmers contending for fifty cents. Pigs were taken at fifteen cents a pound on the hoof. A suit of clothes that had sold for twenty-five dollars in 1913, sold for seventy-five dollars in 1918. Shoes that had been dear at five dollars were now easily sold at fifteen. Copper was worth seventeen cents a pound and pig-iron brought $46 a ton. Carpenters and rivet workers

received fifteen to twenty-five dollars for an eight hour day. Farmers growing rich paid their help three to five dollars a day. It was war, the third bonanza of the American farmer. Emigrants from the Middle West came back to their farms; negro workers hastened from Southern farms where they received five dollars a day for picking cotton to Northern cities where they took the places of soldiers for ten dollars a day. Men were so busy in the cities that they adopted the device of daylight saving, so active on the farms that they submitted to such an absurd system. Europe was exhausting itself in one of its periodic conflicts, millions of men being killed and all existing property being consumed or hypothecated; the United States, spending much, became overnight the richest nation the world had ever

seen.

At the beginning the country owed Europeans as much as four billions; in 1919 European governments and European citizens owed the people and the government of the United States as much as fifteen billions, since increased to more than twenty billions. In 1914 the foreign trade of the United States was nearly four billions a year; in 1918 it was more than nine billions. The annual income of the country was estimated in 1914 at thirty billions; in 1918 it was sixty-eight billions, now ninety billions. American industrial men were the most powerful in the world; bankers were setting up hundreds of branches in various parts of the world; oil men were the masters of the Mexican fields and they were crowding the Russians and the English in the Black Sea region; Ford

cars were to be seen in Shanghai, Constantinople, in Bagdad. Bagdad. And And this domestic mastery and world expansion had come in spite of the Wilson tariff of 1914, the first reduction since Abraham Lincoln. This financial expansion had come at home and elsewhere, contrary to the earnest protests of bankers against the Federal Reserve banking system. The railroads, put under close national surveillance by Wilson in 1914, wore out their tracks hauling war supplies and were taken under immediate Government management in 1918-to win the war. And finally business men, complaining that the Government was hostile to them, procured the Webb dumping law whereby American exporters might unite their strength and drive European business men off their former trading grounds—even their allies in the war. Surely there had never been anything comparable to it; twenty thousand millionaires, products of the war, hustling and elbowing one another in the great cities of the country; hundreds of thousands of fat-pursed tourists waiting at the end of the struggle to "see Europe." How stood things with the American farmers? They planted great crops in obedience to the call of the Government. They increased their operations, doubled the vast investment in fertilizers, put money in the banks, bought costly clothes and traded in lands at two to four hundred dollars an acre, as if the war would last forever-farmers less able to forecast the future than others.

22

The German machine collapsed in November, 1918. After a moment of

drunken prosperity, wheat began to fall in price. In two years wheat sold for less than a dollar a bushel; pigs sold on the farm in 1918 at fifteen cents a pound, in 1921 at seven cents; cotton that had been hurried to market at thirty-five cents a pound stood upon the gin-yards of the South without purchasers; horses that had brought two hundred dollars each could hardly be disposed of in 1922 at fifty dollars. It was the third great deflation of the American farmer; and farmers stood aghast at the prospect; yet the world stood in need of their products.

Europeans were hungry and illclad, ready to enter their mills and supply the United States with cheap goods, buy American wheat and pork at fair prices and begin the payment of their loans in the products of their industry. Could American farmers connect with European consumers? Could the American Government make arrangements with recent allies for the payment of huge war-debts? Both depended upon politics, though the farmer, slow as ever, was not adept in the game and art of politics. He knew less in 1920 than his predecessors had known in the days of Andrew Jackson, yellow schoolhouses to the contrary notwithstanding.

Woodrow Wilson returned from Paris with his doubtful treaty in his pocket. The great leaders of the United States United States were his bitterest enemies, industrial men and bankers, railway managers and the manufacturers of new chemicals. It was the one time in history to support the party in power and conserve the moral fruits of the war. But in the hot temper of 1920 business men and

all others who feared the party that would have "made the world safe for democracy," carried the national elections upon a plurality unknown in times past; the farmers of the West were urged by the "Chicago Tribune" and other great newspapers to vote as their fathers had shot fifty-five years before; and farmers hastened to register the decree of their superiors, voting the ticket of Abraham Lincoln. It was "back to normalcy."

Normalcy meant a dependent farmer class. The expected happened. Representative Joseph W. Fordney of Michigan-most of his State engaged in farming-wrote a new tariff. There was no help in it for the farmer. But every class of industrialists had its schedules and rates so arranged that Europeans could hardly hope to sell a jack-knife in the United States. With a tariff written by the beneficiaries of the tariff, the various groups of competing manufacturers were finally able to work out combinations among themselves whereby they set the prices of their output, set them high enough to take care of labor, which had come into a powerful position during the war. The Fordney tariff was like that of 1864 and after. It gave Europeans little chance to sell to American farmers and take American farm products in payment. The greatest of all privileges since slavery,

was secure.

The railroad managers, resenting the thought of government management, asked a new transportation act. They were successful. They were to be permitted to fix charges according to what they thought was fair. A little later the Interstate

Commerce Commission ruled that five and three quarters per cent on railway investments was a fair return. The great railway systems of the country were now reasonably secure and able to pay their workers wartime or near wartime wages, the Government itself sponsor for their rulings and urging great railway combinations. Two vast interests

industry and transportation-safe under the national roof. The Federal Reserve system, already enacted, served the financial leaders in the vast affair of wet-nursing business of every kind, the employees of banks being safe with wages and salaries in keeping with the new industrial prosperity. Financial autonomy was secure. It only remained to put organized labor in a safe position.

In the midst of the war skilled workers were able to perfect their machinery and to become one of the interests of the country, always consulted in Washington when anything was to be done. At the end of the war a comprehensive immigration act was placed on the statutes. It limited the labor supply of the country by hundreds of thousands a year; and with one or two strategic strikes the leaders of workingmen, albeit these were not wholly successful, gained the sort of recognition from industry, transportation and banking which caused business to acquiesce and leave workingmen to control the price of a day's labor, the conditions of work and the regulation of apprenticeships. Skilled labor had arrived. The leaders of labor soon set up banks of their own and took on the manners and bearing of business. The country must support them. Had not the three million

enemies of all privilege in 1776 gone a long way in 1922-the greatest country in the world, every class but farmers and unorganized city folk duly screened against the winds of adverse economic fortune? Wilson died the next year.

The farmers, with European markets lamed, were left to take their chances in the American market. If they sold wheat or cotton it was at the European price, less the freight. If they sold milk and cream, the price was fixed by city distributors. A crop of apples selling in the cities for fifteen dollars a barrel, retail, hardly brought the apple-grower three dollars a barrel, in 1926 one dollar a barrel. With the American market a fairly closed monopoly, business men weathered the drastic deflation and held their heads high in the great world outside; farmers compelled to sell in competition with farmers all over the world sold at the lowest international prices and were then compelled to buy their supplies in a protected market at prices set by those who sold.

2

It was time for the farmer to seek the wilderness again; but there was no wilderness, no free lands into which he might retreat and start afresh. His money in the bank vanished; his wartime debts increased in value, war taxes bearing heavily upon his land if he was a landowner, upon his articles of consumption if he was a mere tenant-the vast Federal debt to be paid out of the earnings of working folk, Europeans unable to pay in gold and excused from paying in kind. Once more the farmer was paying a heavy part of the cost of a great war, statesmen all against him,

"demagogues" his only friends. A few typical prices will show the inequality of the economic life and show how nearly wartime prices prevailed to the very end of 1925, conditions not different in 1928: Men's suits of farmers' clothes sold in 1914 at $14, in 1920 at $41, in 1925 at $27.64; men's work shoes in 1914 sold at $2.30 a pair, in 1920 at $5 and in 1925 at $3.56 and rising since that time; double wagons sold in 1914 at $66, in 1920 at $155 and in 1925 at $138.26. It was the same with blankets, sheetings, cooking utensils and wire fencing. There was some decline from the peak figures of 1920, but no return to the low prices of 1914. But in every major article of farm output deflation meant a return to the levels of pre-war days. Can the farmer survive under such conditions? Unable to organize in solid phalanxes, unwilling to forget his fifty-year old sectional dislikes, illassisted by the education which the schools and the press give him, is not his lot peasantry, the poor lot of most of our ancestors in Europe?

If one looks over the wide landscape, South or West, there appear empty and dilapidated houses and shabby fences; fields giving certain evidence of poor economy and decided erosion. There are automobiles to be sure and good roads, both of which tend to raise land values without raising the prices of farm products and at the same time to hurry farmer's children to the towns and cities. Over half the farmers are now tenants; and half of those who own lands are bound fast by mortgages and hardly able to obtain credit in the farm loan banks set up for their benefit. There are some suc