22 SOME IMPENDING CHANGES. 



la 1910, with an urban population of 65,000,000, it may be necessary, in order to 

 employ such an enormous force, to adopt such a fiscal policy as will ensure the free entry 

 of all materials euteriug into manufactures which we are unable to produce, and to so levy 

 imposts as in no measure to lessen Durability to compete with Europe for the trade of 

 the world, and thus postpone, to the latest possible day, that social condition necessitating 

 emigration to South America, Australia or Africa. 



THE FARMER IN THE COMING CHANGE. 



Twenty years since, wherever the cultivator owned the land he occupied he was 

 esceptioually prosperous and so continued to be until about the middle of the eighth de- 

 cade, when the opening of so many new.farms in the Missouri valley and t!;e divc'lopment 

 of Indian wheat exportation so changed the relations of supply and demand for food 

 products that prices fell greatly and the farmer's revenue, from a given area, was nuuh 

 lessened; yet it is more than questionable if this lowering of the price of food has rtsuUed 

 beneficially to the industrial classes, although it has enabled them to buy their food for 

 less money, yet probably such food has, because of the disastrous change in the farmer's 

 condition, actually cost them more labor than it would had prices remained at the level 

 obtaining during the first half of the eighth decade, when the price (in gold) of Eiiglisli 

 grown wheat, in the markets of Great Britain, was 85 per cent, greater than the price 

 obtaining in the same markets in the year 1890, as the changed conditions surrounding 

 the employment of the capital and labor of the farmer have, in a very large measure, de- 

 stroyed the purchasing power of the most numerous class of thecustomersof the merchant, 

 manufacturer, artisan and laborer. 



The agricultural population of the United States number some 25,000,000 and is 

 forty per cent, of the whole and when the purchasing power of such a great proportion 

 of the peopfe has been destroyed or greatly diminished it means lessened employment for 

 others, lower wages as well as a lessened purchasing power on the part of all the indus- 

 trial classes, more or less commercial stagnation, hard times, a descending scale of land 

 and other values and increased indebtedness on the part of the producing classes, whose 

 wares are selling at or below the cost of production. This has long been the case with a 

 very considerable part, if not the whole, of the agricultural class and has resulted in less 

 power to purchase the products of the labor of others, who, in turn, have thereby had 

 their purchasing power diminished so that the whole economic fabric has been subjected 

 to unprofitable conditions which have aflected all classes alilie, if in varying degrees. 



In the case of the American, as well as all other farmers, the reduction in his re- 

 turns has been abnormally great, as the prices of farm products — as measured by the price 

 of wheat — were 85 per cent, greater during the first half of the eighth decade than those 

 obtaining during the year just closed, and this change in price very accurately measures 

 the change in his purchasing power and the result is that he wears last year's coat, buj'* 

 little or no hardware, puts up few or no new buildings, makes the old buggy last another 

 year, the daughter has to do without the promised musical instrument, the son cannot 

 secure the expected education and the makers of hardware, coats, books, pictures, organs, 

 pianos, furniture and carriages and teachers, transporters, merchants, jewelers, professional 

 men and artisans are but half employed, and find it more difficult to buy flour made from 

 seventy-flve cent wheat than they would if wheat h>d never sold below $1.50 per bushel. 



This state of affairs has, however, under the conditions which have existed in this 

 country, probably been inevitable, and while many such auxiliary causes as the unrea- 

 sonable exactions of the transportation companies and the far-reaching and baleful prac- 



