FARMER'S WAR AGAINST MONOPOLIES. 327 







manner of ancient highwaymen, by high-handed defi- 

 ance of society and law, the rush of swift steeds, the 

 clash of steel, and the stern ' Stand and deliver ! ' The 

 bandits of modern civilization, who enrich themselves 

 by the plunder of others, come with chests full of 

 charters; judges are their friends, if not their tools; 

 and they wield no weapon more alarming than the little 

 pencil with which they calculate differences of rate, 

 apparently so insignificant that public opinion wonders 

 why the farmer should complain about such trifles. 

 Yet the farmers have complained, and, complaining in 

 vain, have got angry. When large bodies of men get 

 angry, the results are likely to be important, though 

 they may not always prove beneficent. The farmers' 

 movement threatens a revolution in the business of 

 transportation, if not in the laws which protect invest- 

 ments of capital. It seems strange, no doubt, to those 

 who do not know that a change of one-twentieth of a 

 mill per one hundred pounds, in the charge for trans- 

 portation per mile, may take hundreds of millions from 

 the actual value of farms. It can neither be compre- 

 hended nor intelligently directed, without a full under- 

 standing of the conditions under which agriculture 

 exists in the Northwestern States, and of the power 

 which the railway has exerted and still wields for the 

 development or destruction of that great industry. 



"About 150^)00,000 bushels of wheat, 11,000,000 

 tons of hay, and 1,012,000,000 bushels of cereals are 

 annually produced by eleven States, having in 1870 a 

 population of 14,283,000. In this statement, as in the 

 term * Northwestern States,' when used in this article, 

 Kentucky and Missouri are included with the former 

 free States of the Mississippi Valley. Had these States 



