THE DECADENCE OF FARMING. 



35 



small ones than small ones do to large ones. Or are the protected 

 interests really afraid to take their own prescription ? We suspect 

 they would be, and, in fact, could not be hired to take it. 



But it is the impending truth which will some day, and I think 

 very soon, filter into the farmer's mind that alone can save him. 

 When he sees that he, and he most of all, is bled for others, and 

 for their private gain, he will cease to believe in enforced phle- 

 botomy. When he finds out that the word " protective," so far as 

 he is concerned, is an abominable misnomer, and should be trans- 

 lated " destructive," there will be heard a voice from the farms 

 that will give the system so long delusively described its death- 

 blow. Years ago the farmer's boy, when he went to school, was 

 taught that the business of the United States consisted of " agri- 

 culture, manufactures, and commerce." It has long since ceased 

 to be an equal tri-division. Agriculture and commerce, as they 

 once were, are things of the past. The one has been made un- 

 profitable beyond description ; the other is now impossible, except 

 in a reduced way, under an alien flag. Ship-building is " protected " 

 to death, and the American money that goes toward having it 

 done abroad simply builds ships that, in case of a war, can be 

 turned against our own shores and our depleted navy. But we 

 have as trophies of our absurd Chinese system manufactures 

 (none too flourishing, if the men engaged in them know) and a 

 " protective " tariff. 



The long endurance of the superstition on which " protection " 

 is based has had two bulwarks the necessity for revenues ex- 

 traordinary, and the power of money, contributed by directly in- 

 terested parties. An economically administered government 

 should break down the first, and the force of facts the second. 



As we hold in derision now the discovery of the philosopher's 

 stone and perpetual motion, so future generations will look upon 

 this fetich of our time, and not without unspeakable amazement. 

 They will see a generation here and now that is trying to lift itself 

 over the fence by standing in a corn-basket and pulling upward 

 on the handles. The wonder will not be so much that they tried, 

 as it will be that for so long a time they supposed they were suc- 

 cessfully performing this impossible feat. 



The history of the genus Platanus, which includes the Oriental plane-tree and 

 our sycamore, has been traced by Lester F. Ward back to the Tertiary period, 

 when there were at least twenty species, mostly American or arctic. The genus 

 and the entire type to which it belongs seem therefore to have been American ; 

 and its numerous and strange archaic forms "not only formed the umbrageous 

 forests on the shores of the great inland Laramie Sea where the Rocky Mountains 

 now stand, but also those of the ocean at a time when it still pushed its arms 

 northward across what are now the great plains of Texas, Colorado, and Wyoming.' 1 " 



