18 THE AGRARIAN CRUSADE 



among the farmers of the West. These farmers on 

 the other hand were beginning to be very much in- 

 terested in a number of economic reforms which 

 would vitally affect their welfare, such as the reduc- 

 tion and readjustment of the burden of taxation, 

 the control of corporations in the interests of the 

 people, the reduction and regulation of the cost 

 of transporation, and an increase in the currency 

 supply. Some of these propositions occasionally 

 received recognition in Liberal speeches and plat- 

 forms, but several of them were anathema to many 

 of the Eastern leaders of that movement. Had 

 these leaders been gifted with vision broad enough 

 to enable them to appreciate the vital economic and 

 social problems of the West, the Liberal Republi- 

 can movement might perhaps have caught the 

 ground swell of agrarian discontent, and the out- 

 come might then have been the formation of an en- 

 during national party of liberal tendencies broader 

 and more progressive than the Liberal Republican 

 party yet less likely to be swept into the vagaries 

 of extreme radicalism than were the Anti-Mo- 

 nopoly and Greenback parties of after years. A 

 number of western Liberals such as A. Scott Sloan 

 in Wisconsin and Ignatius Donnelly in Minnesota 

 championed the farmers' cause, it is true, and in 



