Defenseless Trade Position of Agriculture . 87 



CHAPTER VII. 



The Defenseless Teade Position of Agriculture. 



Have tlie leaders in the agricultural ranks recognized 

 tlie trend of the times and taken measures to guard 

 farmers from the destructive effect? If bugs, or worms, 

 or blight threatened the destruction of crops, the alarm 

 would be sounded in farmers' journals, from agricul- 

 tural colleges, and from the Agricultural Department at 

 Washington. But when the crops are exchanged for 

 what the farmer requires, the men who manufacture such 

 supplies, by organized action, or by the enactment of hos- 

 tile legislation, may work greater injury than bug, or 

 worm, or blight, and our agricultural leaders look on in 

 silence. Why? 



The leading men in agriculture, especially at the East, 

 have confined attention strictly to production. Their aim 

 has been to have the farmer produce the most and best 

 at least expense. There is the sum and substance of all 

 the mighty efforts of most of the agricultural leaders for 

 more than fifty years. Like the man with the rake in 

 Pilgrim's Progress, the eyes of farmers have been kept 

 fixed on the ground, blind alike to heavenly vision and 

 the work of designing men robbing them of the fruit of 

 their labor. Year after year, in season and out of sea- 

 son, the agricultural mind has been stuffed with the same 

 everlasting diet of production. Much the same matter 

 has been threshed over and over, from morn to night, 

 from youth to hoary age. The doses have been adminis- 

 tered at farmers ' meetings held in the winter all over the 



