CURRENCY AND FARMING. 1? 



our legal-tenders resulted in selling millions of them at forty 

 cents on a dollar, and these German capitalists and other 

 foreign capitalists invested money at that time — and well, 

 too. 



But, not to dwell on this matter of the mistake of our legal- 

 tender currency, it is the currency of the country, it is forced 

 upon us. We have got to endure it till we can get rid of it. 

 Let us see some of the burdens it lays upon us ; upon the 

 farmers of the country, all over it. And in this connection 

 one or two financial laws may be stated. A man who gets 

 hold of these simple principles of finance can see where they 

 will lead to. These laws are just as certain and fixed as that 

 of gravitation. One law is, when we export any commodity 

 and retain of that commodity for our own consumption at 

 home, the price of the part we retain is measured exactly by 

 the price of what we send off". The price of wheat, for 

 instance, or bread-stuffs generally, which we are exporting 

 largely, depends exactly on the prices current in Mark Lane, 

 London, which is the controlling market of the world. The 

 price in Mark Lane determines just what any farmer in Mas- 

 sachusetts or Minnesota has got to sell his wheat or corn for, 

 minus the cost of transportation, and this cost you will notice 

 is to be estimated in gold ; only gold is taken there. Now, 

 notice that productions that we produce and do not export, 

 and use the whole of them at home, are determined in price 

 by the home market exclusively, and the prices are regulated 

 in currency all through. Now let us see what it is we export 

 besides gold and bonds. First and largest, of course, cotton ; 

 petroleum, grain, flour, bread-stuffs, butter, beef, cheese, lard, 

 pork and tobacco. Agricultural products, you see, make up 

 the great body of our exports. Now, the price of all these 

 agricultural productions that we do not export depends, neces- 

 sarily, on the price of those we do export, and the prices of 

 those we do export are reckoned on the gold basis. Gold, 

 we will say, stands at 1.10, which makes the farmer sell his 

 produce there at the rate of 1.10 in currency for the dollar in 

 gold. Now, this which the farmer sells, he sells on the gold 

 basis ; but, on the other hand, the productions which he is 

 obliged to buy — cotton goods, woollen goods, boots and shoes, 

 labor, etc., which are not exporting in any quantity — have 

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