204 HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL. 



In order to make a success of farming, we must necessarily sell more 

 than we buy. The individual, the State, or the nation that buys more 

 than it sells is on the high road to bankruptcy ; or, in other words, if 

 the balance of trade is in our favor, there is no danger of failure. But 

 when one class of our citizens, and that class the largest numerically, 

 produce a commodity, and the surplus of that commodity, which regu- 

 lates the price of the whole amount, is sold in a free-trade country, while 

 the same class of citizens have to buy in a high protectional tariff coun- 

 try, it would seem to me, to say the least, that there is something wrong 

 in our laws. The necessaries of life should be placed on the free list. 

 The value of the cotton alone that was exported in the year 1883, 

 wliich is the last report I had to refer to, was the sum of $247,328,721, 

 heading the list of all farm products exported. 



The next was bread and breadstuff, $208,040,850 ; provisions of other 

 sorts, $107,388,287; the next is tobacco, which will interest you Ken- 

 tucky brethren, $22,095,229. The sum total of all agricultural prod- 

 ucts was $619,269,449. The value of all exports, other than products 

 of domestic agriculture, was $184,954,183, showing that the exports are 

 the products of the farm, to the extent of 77 per cent. 



These figures, taken from Report No. 12, of the 48th Congress, show 

 that farm products exceed all other exports by $434,223,632. Who 

 dare say, in the face of these figures, that we as farmers are not a work- 

 ing people ? And as cotton is much the largest of any one farm product 

 exported, and the one the Agricultural Wheelers raise the largest amount 

 of, it would seem to me that there might be some plan devised by our 

 organization, with the assistance and co-operation of other organizations 

 in the South, whereby we might reduce the acreage of cotton, and by 

 so doing receive as much for 4,500,000 bales as we now do for the 

 6,500,000. Supply and demand in a measure regulate the value of a 

 commodity. We find, by referring to a report of the Commissioners of 

 Agriculture, that wheat declined in price from $1.05 to 77 cents per 

 bushel, as the acreage increased; and we find that trust companies, 

 which are a corporation of corporations, will allow very valuable plants 

 worth, in some cases, thousands upon thousands of dollars, to remain 

 idle, in order to reduce the output of their product, that the supply 

 should not exceed the demand. We have an illustration of this in the 

 Cotton Seed Oil Trust Company in Arkansas. And instead of increasing 

 the cotton area, as the farmers of the cotton belt did in 1885, about 5 per 

 cent, if they would reduce it about 30 per cent/ there would be fewer 

 mortgages given, and it would then be raised as a surplus crop, and we 

 should be independent, as we by right should be. 



