FUNDAMENTAL CONDITIONS 35 



planters. From that time on, the needs and interests of the 

 more or less organized mercantile and manufacturing classes 

 received primary consideration and the positions of political 

 power were occupied more and more by representatives from 

 these classes or by lawyers who took substantially the same 

 point of view. 1 



The Forty-third Congress of the United States, in session 

 from 1873 to 1875, w iU furnish an example of this lack of repre- 

 sentation in the councils of the nation, of which the farmers 

 complained. Sixty-one per cent of the members of this Congress 

 were lawyers, sixteen per cent were engaged in commercial 

 or manufacturing pursuits, and only seven per cent professed 

 the occupation of farming. Yet the census of 1870 shows that 

 forty-seven per cent of the working population of the country 

 was still engaged in farming while commerce and manufacturing 

 could claim only thirty-one per cent. That this situation 

 was not confined to national politics can be seen from the 

 statistics of the legislature of Illinois in 1874. This included 

 but eight farmers among fifty-one senators and forty farmers 

 among the one hundred fifty-three members of the lower house, 

 in spite of the fact that over half of the population of the state 

 was agricultural. 2 



Not only did the farmers feel that as a class they failed to 

 receive adequate direct representation in the government of 

 the country, but there was also a belief that their interests were 

 not given due consideration by those who were supposed to 

 represent them. Ignorant often of what their true interests 

 were, scattered broadcast over the country, without either time 

 or opportunity to make their wants known, and often following 

 blindly in the wake of the political party to which they had 

 been attached by issues now dead and gone, the farmers were 

 looked upon by the political leaders as a stable element whose 



1 Flagg, in American Social Science Journal, vi. 108 (July, 1874); Elliot, Ameri- 

 can Farms, 175-186; Alpha Messer, Benefits of the Grange (pamphlet, 26. ed.), 5. 



2 Flagg, in American Social Science Journal, vi. 108 (July, 1874). Similarly, a 

 constitutional convention in Ohio in 1873 contained sixty- two lawyers and sixteen 

 farmers out of a total of one hundred and two members. American Annual Cyclo- 

 pedia, 1873, P- 607. 





