CHAPTER XVI. 



THE MOVEMENT TOWARD CO-OPERATION. 



WHAT ARE THE FARMERS GRIEVANCES? 



The question has often been asked, What are the farmers 

 grievances ? These have never, at the conventions, been 

 fully defined ; but they may be summed up in a few words: 

 The agricultural classes suffer, and always have suffered, 

 from the rapacity of capital, aggregated and centralized. 



There are two principal ways in which capital is employed 

 to overreach them. The first is through the combination of 

 those who buy their produce, thereby creating a protected 

 monopoly, limited, it is true, but, nevertheless, uniformly 

 successful. In this class I do not mean to include the ordi 

 nary country merchant, who buys produce, or trades and 

 barters for it, but those rings, great and small, which are 

 formed to gamble in the necessaries of life in our cities. 

 Their ramifications sometimes extend to the regular dealers 

 in the principal railroad towns, and Sometimes even to the 

 leading railroad officials themselves, but oftener are confined 

 to a few of the great distributing centers, as New York, 

 Buffalo, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, etc. The minor com 

 binations in the ordinary railroad towns are merely local and 

 of short duration, so that the intelligent man may hold his 

 produce, and thus assist in breaking them. If farmers were 

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