SKETCH OF MODERN AGRICULTURE 



97 



anticipated rise in the value of his land as a partial compen- 

 sation for his work ; that is, he continued to grow and sell crops 

 at a loss, calculating that the future rise in the value of his 

 land would eventually recoup him for any temporary loss which 

 he might incur. 



Agricultural discontent. The natural result was an over- 

 sup] )ly of farm products. Side by side with this wonderful ex- 

 pansion of the cultivated area and the consequent increase in 

 agricultural production, there grew up a vast amount of agricul- 

 tural discontent. This in turn gave rise to a series of farmers' 

 movements, beginning with the Grange movement of the early 

 seventies. This is one of the most striking episodes in the 

 economic history of recent times. Everywhere, at all times, 

 the agricultural interests have been looked upon as conserva- 

 tive. The farmers have been called the bulwark of the state ; 

 the) have been relied upon as the people who stand for the 

 existing order of things, while the manufacturing and commer- 

 cial interests have commonly been regarded as furnishing the 

 more radical and unstable elements in the life of modern states. 

 In this country, however, between 1870 and 1900, that order 

 was completely reversed. For the first time in modern history 

 the landowning interests have been the turbulent, dissatisfied, 

 radical, or semirevolutionary elements of our population. The 

 Grange movement of the early seventies was not in its origin a 

 radical movement, nor were its objects political, but it speedily 

 developed into a political movement aiming primarily at reforms 

 in the banking and railroad policy of the country. Next came 

 the greenback movement of the later seventies and the early 

 eighties, which threatened for a time to overturn our monetary 

 system completely. Finally there came the free-silver movement 

 of t hie nineties, another movement of the same kind, which sub- 

 sided only at the return of prosperity to the agricultural inter- 

 ests. It was the overexpansion of agriculture and its consequent 



