380 HISTORY OF THE GRANGE MOVEMENT; OR, 



her one " wheat, if there was ever any raised in this 

 State ; but it was inspected as number two, and that 

 man was actually robbed of four or five cents on every 

 bushel of that grain. Those Milwaukee dealers will 

 mix that good wheat with a lot that is dirty or light, 

 and sell the whole for a better price. That is one rea- 

 son why I say that our grain ought to go directly to 

 the consumer without so much handling by those fellows 

 who steal a part of the price of our produce and charge 

 us for the service. 



" t Now we don't ask anything unfair or unreasonable 

 of the railroads. We say, let them be economically 

 operated ; let them stop paying such enormous salaries 

 to their officers and give us fair treatment, and we are 

 willing to pay them reasonably for their services. But 

 they need not expect that we are going to allow them 

 to earn interest on the money that we ourselves have 

 put into the roads ; we are determined on that point.' 



" Colonel Cochrane says that the cost of farming in this 

 State has been greatly increased by the building of rail- 

 roads, or at least since their introduction. Before the 

 war he could hire men who were capable of conducting 

 his farm, without his supervision, for less money than 

 he now has to pay for hands who hardly know 

 enough to hitch up a team and go into the field to work 

 unless somebody tells them how to do it. The only 

 hands he can now hire are Dutch (I suppose he meant 

 Germans), and they do only about half as much work 

 as the Americans he used to get. The same is true of 

 work in the houses ; no matter how able and willing 

 the farmer may be to hire servants, his wife must be a 

 drudge. It is almost impossible to find, he said, a girl 

 who knows enough to cook a meal, and who will hire 



