MAGIC OF THE MIXING-HOUSE 



In these conditions it is easy to understand 

 why the farmers regarded with always grow- 

 ing disgust the various efforts of philanthro- 

 pists and others to inculcate thrift or start 

 movements of "Back to the land!" When 

 a single elevator could in three months, by 

 merely shifting the grades of the wheat it 

 housed, clear a profit thereon of $83,000, and 

 when commission men could easily make $90 

 a car of illegitimate proceeds at the farmer's 

 expense, it was evident that what was needed 

 was not more thrift, but less larceny. It was 

 also evident that farming would never be 

 anything but hopeless drudgery so long as 

 this system existed. Senator McCumber's 

 estimate of $70,000,000 a year of loss to 

 the Northwestern grain-grower by false grad- 

 ing alone seemed in the light of these facts 

 to be much too conservative. An authority 

 at the North Dakota Agricultural College 

 figured the annual loss to the farmers of that 

 state through the unjustifiable seizure of his 

 screenings at two million dollars. It was but 

 one item in a long list. On every side he 

 was the prey and sport of powerful forces 

 that stripped him, as he bitterly phrased it, 

 to his shirt and his socks. From dockage 

 for dirt that did not exist to charges for 

 switching cars that were never switched, the 

 System, to his mind, was organized against 

 him. 



63 



