FUNDAMENTAL CONDITIONS 9 



conclusion that a monopoly had developed among these com- 

 mission men or middlemen, as they were called, and that the 

 price which they received for their grain was no longer con- 

 trolled by the Liverpool market but by a grain ring which went 

 so far as to juggle the Liverpool quotations in order to deceive 

 them. This situation was the immediate cause of the farmers' 

 movement in that state. 1 



FARMERS AND RAILROADS 



The farmer's prosperity depended as much on his ability 

 to send the crop to the consumer cheaply and get back in return 

 the variety of articles which he required for his consumption, 

 as it did on his ability to produce those crops. To help in the 

 solution of this problem of distribution, two things were desired 

 by the farmers: a cheapening of transportation and a reduction 

 of the cost of handling commodities by the middlemen who stood 

 between producer and consumer. It was in connection with 

 these two aspects of the problem of distribution that the work 

 of the Granger movement was most significant. 



At the time with which we are concerned the problem of 

 transportation in the United States had come to be, in the 

 main, a railroad problem; and other means of transportation 

 were of subsidiary importance only. The period of active 

 railroad construction in the fifties had been checked by the 

 panic of 1857, and there was no opportunity for a revival until 

 the close of the war. But from the end of the war to the panic 

 of 1873 the amount of railroad construction increased by leaps 

 and bounds. The great western plains were then first bridged 

 by a railroad to the Pacific; the upper Mississippi Valley was 

 covered with a network of roads; and in the South the railway 

 system, shattered by the war, was repaired, reorganized and 

 extended. 2 



The mania for railroad construction which developed out 

 of the real need for transportation facilities very soon outran 



1 Ezra Carr, The Patrons of Husbandry on the Pacific Coast, 65-87. 



2 C. F. Adams, Jr., " The Granger Movement," in North American Review, cxx. 

 397 (April, 1875). 



