INTERNATIONAL CONSOLIDATION 215 



invariably succeed to filch away from the farmer his produce 

 and deprive him almost entirely of the results of his labors. 



While in this country, as well as in all other civilized coun- 

 tries, t. i., the countries which have entered already the stage 

 of competitive agricultural production, nature yields her 

 bounty to the producer in direct proportion to his efforts, but 

 social relations rob him of nearly all he creates, while in other 

 words, the army of non-producers arrayed on the distributive 

 side of agricultural industry by virtue of their ownership of 

 means of distribution, and particularly and especially by crim- 

 inal manipulations of the produce market, daily commit an 

 open and outrageous highway robbery on the farmer all over 

 the world, while the American farmer, as well as the farmer 

 of all civilized countries, just the infinitesimal percentage of 

 "bonanza farms" and great European landowners excepted, 

 have become practically reduced to the status of proletarians of 

 the lands, hereby the economic outrage perpetrated on the 

 farmer of modern civilized world by modern social conditions, 

 by no means ends. Under the present system the producers of 

 agricultural products in the United States must foot the entire 

 cost of production, which, at a conservative estimate, must 

 foot up to two billions dollars ($2,000,000,000) a year. If the 

 agricultural producer of the country sells his wheat at a dollar 

 per bushel and pays five dollars for a suit of clothes, the latter 

 costs him five bushels of wheat, but when the protective tariff 

 raises the price of the same suit of clothes to ten dollars, the 

 latter costs the farmer already ten bushels of wheat instead 

 of five bushels, as before. Thus the price of the suit has been 

 raised for the farmer simply by the governmental action (the 

 Tariff Act) irrespectively of its intrinsic value. In this way 

 the protective tariff works in the United States all along the 

 line, raising the cost of manufactured products averagely by 

 80 per cent., and thus practically reducing the proletarian in- 

 come 1 if the average farmer just to 20 per cent, of its nominal 

 size. In this way it came to pass that in the case of the Amer- 

 ican farmer the question of the price for his produce is not 

 even the question of absolute quantity of money, received by 

 him for ti , but simply In qu lion of a proper pro- 



portion. Similar is the conditi • of the farmer in all agricul- 



