24 THE GRANGER MOVEMENT 



public debts also imposed a considerable burden of taxation 

 on the people and the methods by which the taxes were collected 

 forced the farmers and other people of small means to bear an 

 undue proportion of the burden. 



AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS AND PRICES 



In considering the various causes which made agriculture 

 largely unremunerative in the seventies, it is difficult to assign 

 to each its relative importance, but if any one thing can be said 

 to be the primary cause of that situation, it is the great extension 

 or even inflation of agricultural operations in the decade follow- 

 ing the war; an inflation which was shared by many other 

 industries and which presents many of the features of a specula- 

 tive boom. The prevailing high prices just at the close of the 

 war, the inflated condition of the currency, and the spirit of 

 restlessness and enterprise developed by the war, all contributed 

 to produce a feverish industrial condition and turned men's 

 minds to the development of the great unsettled areas of the 

 West, as a new field for exploitation. 1 The railroads, aided by 

 subsidies, pushed rapidly out, population followed, and the two 

 reacting on each other quickly advanced the frontier another 

 step across the continent. 2 



When the war closed in 1865, there were but twelve thousand 

 miles of railroad in all the states and territories of the North- 

 west. This amount was almost doubled by 1870 and a decade 

 later the mileage was over forty-three thousand. Taking the 

 territory west of the Mississippi only, there were less than 

 four thousand miles of railroad in operation in 1867, an amount 

 which was increased by 1877 to sixteen thousand, or consid- 

 erably more than the mileage of the whole Northwest at the 

 close of the war. 3 The accompanying movement of population 

 can be seen by tracing the frontier line of settlement, which 

 in 1860 ran east and west across central Wisconsin, took in 



1 Nation, xvii. 68, xix. 36 (July 31, 1873, July 16, 1874); Atlantic, xxxii. 508-512 

 (October, 1873); Pierson, in Popular Science Monthly, xxxii. 202 (December, 1887); 

 Adams, in North American Review, cxx. 421-424 (April, 1874). 



2 Peffer, in Forum, viii. 464-466 (December, 1889). 



3 Porter, The West, 47; E. E. Sparks, National Development, ch. iv. 



