302 HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL. 



interests and economics of agriculture, State, interstate, national, and international. 

 It is for that very purpose we are here assembled." 



" Our interests require, we demand, an equitable readjustment of the whole system 

 of taxation, federal, State, local; distributing its burdens equally among producers, 

 distributors, consumers. No legitimate business can prosper until war taxation is 

 reduced to a peace basis, without galling and grinding discriminations for the rich 

 and against the poor; nor as long as we gather in the treasury an annual surplus of 

 more than one hundred millions over and above every reasonable or honest public 

 necessity." 



Undoubtedly the most important meeting of the Farmers' Congress 

 was the one held in New Orleans, at the time of the great exposition 

 there. At that meeting were present and participating, delegates from 

 nearly every State and Territory. Among them was scarcely a name not 

 known throughout the country as a leading agriculturist. That this 

 meeting exercised an important influence upon the rise and progress of 

 the National Farmers' Alliance, it is impossible not to perceive. 



Those who would discern the true intent and meaning of secret devel- 

 opments in industrial organization, those who would understand aright 

 the significance of the demands now urged by these organizations, must 

 not overlook the character and the significance of the work done by the 

 Farmers' National Congress. 



Among the accomplished results which must be credited to the efforts 

 of the Congress are the enlargement of the scope and increase of the 

 dignity and influence of the Department of Agriculture, and the final 

 transfer of the Signal Service, or more properly the Weather Bureau, to 

 that department, with the assurance of further increased precision, use- 

 fulness, and importance of the service. That the Interstate Commerce 

 law was also the legitimate outcome of the agitation of the question set 

 on foot by the Congress, seems to be true. But the great work on the 

 Congress was its unconscious work in preparing the way for the Alliance. 

 It was as a prime factor in the earlier evolution of industrial organizations 

 that the Congress is important and interesting to the intelligent student 

 of contemporaneous events. When the final outcome and the entire 

 results are before the world, those who may be then living will be aware 

 that human freedom was at this time rapidly unfolding one stage of its 

 progress along the path of its divinely conducted evolution, a path 

 tending to that " one far-off divine event, to which the whole creation 



