18 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



their price determined, necessarily, by the state of the market 

 at home, and this market at home, estimated in currency, has 

 shown a rise in prices with which you are all familiar. It has 

 been the policy of the government to keep down the price of 

 gold by occasional sales of the reserve in the treasury, but 

 the government has not been able to keep down the prices of 

 these other things. It is certainly within bounds to say that 

 there has been a rise in prices of fifty per cent. Now put 

 these two facts together. For what you sell, you sell in gold 

 at a reduced valu ti(,n by this procedure ; for what you buy, 

 you have got to pay in currency at the full valuation. Gold 

 at 1.10 raises prices to 1.50, which makes the difference of 

 forty per cent, which you are obliged to sacrifice in every 

 bargain you make. There is the simple fact that presses 

 upon the farmers of to-day. There is forty per cent, of their 

 substance wrung from them by this mischievous currency and 

 the course of the treasury department at Washington. The 

 farmers understand that they are burdened, but a great many 

 of them do not know for the life of them why, and so they 

 go on talking about it in a blind fashion, saying this is the 

 trouble and that. 



Some say it is the railroads. I do not propose to take up 

 in defence of the railroads ; but our tariff of fifty per cent, 

 on iron, the rise in wages and the higher cost of construction, 

 freights, etc., have made them far from profitable. Of course, 

 they bear heavily on the Western farmer, who must get his 

 grain to market ; but those men are foolish counsellors who 

 try to delude the farmers in the West with the thought that 

 the whole trouble is with the railroads. The farmers are set 

 against the greedy capitalists, as they call them. But how 

 does the problem look to these greedy capitalists? They have 

 three hundred and fifty millions invested in railroads at the 

 AVest, and, with the exception of a few isolated cases, none 

 of them are paying a cent in dividends. So far as getting 

 any money from them, the capitalists might just as well throw 

 their money into the sea. The trouble is not with the rail- 

 roads ; the trouble is not with the great class of middle-men, 

 about which we hear so much; a class which, in a country 

 like ours, it is perfectly idle to think of getting along without. 

 The trouble is not taxation. Taxation is heavy; it is prodig- 



