THE SUB-TREASURY PLAN. 339 



conditions that surround it, about as much as they have other lines of 

 business, on the average. It is important to note that, for the last 

 twenty-five years, agriculture has, as compared with the other two great 

 branches of production, manufacture and commerce, been rapidly 

 becoming depressed and unprofitable. Political economists have long 

 recognized the fact that a country could not reach a high degree of 

 prosperity if it depended alone upon either one of the three great 

 divisions of productive effort, agriculture, commerce, or manufacture, 

 and that it requires a wise development of all these branches to pro- 

 duce the highest degree of prosperity in each. It must, then, be a 

 source of concern to all, that agriculture is depressed. That the de- 

 pressed condition of agriculture has been developed and intensified 

 during the last twenty-five years, a period of material progress without a 

 parallel in the world's history, the development of which should have 

 produced a prosperous condition of agriculture, and through it reacted 

 favorably upon commerce and manufacture, is indicative of a very 

 potent cause, and one worthy the most careful analysis. 



In a practical examination of this subject it must be remembered 

 that it is a condition to be met, and not a theory ; that things must be 

 viewed as they are, and not as they should be. For this purpose, take 

 two of the leading products of agriculture, wheat and cotton, and trace 

 the changes made in regard to them, during that period. Twenty-five 

 years ago wheat was raised by farmers throughout the North generally, 

 as one of their leading money crops. It was cut by reapers and bound 

 by hand. The farmer had his granary on his farm, in which he stored 

 it until ready to sell. It was threshed by itinerant horse-power thresh- 

 ers, that found steady work throughout fall, winter, and spring. Local 

 mills, thickly scattered over the country, ground the flour for local con- 

 sumption, and the balance was sold when the price suited the farmer. 

 The farmers of the West then hauled their wheat to market, a distance 

 of from ten to a hundred miles. All this guaranteed a moderately even 

 sale of wheat by the farmer, from August until the next June or July, 

 and it was very common for a farmer to have his wheat on hand for 

 more than a year. 



Note the difference now. The development of railway systems has 

 brought the great West so close to market that wheat can no t longer be 

 profitably grown in the East, and the local mills have long since been 

 abandoned to the rats, or devoted to other purposes ; while in the West, 

 the great wheat-growing district, the wheat is cut and bound by machin- 

 ery, and eagerly lapped into the iron jaws of immense steam threshers 

 everywhere present. There is no delay, and from the very thresher the 



