FARMERS TO THE FRONT 51 



etc. They intend to put such a price on their pro- 

 ducts that they can hire the best help in the country. 

 Thus the demand for union labor will be increased 

 by millions. The illustrations might be carried out 

 indefinitely ; but what the use ? If unfair advantages 

 are cut off, or other classes built up to a level, though 

 the class enjoying them would lose something, it 

 would lose nothing to which it was entitled, and 

 everybody would be benefited. This government 

 can not continue half just and half unjust, any more 

 than it could be half slave and half free. Indeed, 

 injustice involves slavery, for the man who is the 

 victim of injustice is the slave of him who profits 

 by it. Thus the question is one of emancipation 

 quite as much as it was forty years ago. So it is 

 proposed to raise up this Third Power as the de- 

 fender and champion of liberty. The man who is 

 forced to pay one dollar more for an article than it is 

 fairly worth, or to sell it for a dollar less than it is 

 worth, is to the extent of that dollar a slave. The toil 

 represented in that extra dollar is as truly slave 

 labor as was the toil of the black man forty years 

 ago, or that of the miserable peon in the Alabama 

 cotton-fields at the present time. And how can the 

 American farmer, who is grandiloquently spoken of 

 by campaign orators as the freest man on earth, 

 be free at all, in any proper sense, when he is com- 

 pelled to market the fruits of his hard labor at 

 prices made by some one else, who frequently enjoys, 

 at the hands of the government, an advantage that 



