34 2 HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL. 



average annual fluctuations in price of the five products affected by the 

 sub-treasury system for twenty years, from 1868 to 1887, was 41 per 

 cent. That is to say, these products have fluctuated 20.5 per cent 

 above, and 20.5 per cent below, the mean price, on the average, every 

 year for twenty years. This practically means that if the farmer received 

 79.5 cents for a product during the three months in which he was com- 

 pelled to sell, the mean price he might have realized, could he have 

 waited a short time, was 100, and the price the consumer would have 

 paid him still later was 120.5. These are not changes of price due to 

 locality or service of any kind whatever, but due principally to the re- 

 duction of general prices that must follow the violent contraction of the 

 relative volume of money, a condition that is unavoidably the result of 

 a fixed and inflexible volume meeting a great and suddenly augmented 

 demand. 



The conclusion from all this is very plain and forcible. The farmer 

 makes his investment, in his productive effort, principally during the 

 time between April and August, when the largest amount of the circu- 

 lating medium and all the credit papers has been released from the 

 products of agriculture, because the surplus has been exported or con- 

 sumed, and consequently, the demand having diminished, the volume 

 of money is relatively larger, and prices are higher. He realizes from 

 his investment, during the season in which prices are depressed on ac- 

 count of the excessive demand for money meeting an inflexible supply. 

 The result is, and has been for twenty years, that he sells at a time when 

 prices are 40 per cent lower than they were when he bought. No 

 business on earth could survive such an unfair discrimination, and the 

 farmers could not, but for the fact that nearly 40 per cent of the value 

 of their products must have been labor, not capital investment ; and as 

 40 per cent exceeds the labor investment, it shows the inroad made 

 upon their capital by these losses, which are largely represented, at this 

 time, by mortgage indebtedness. 



This is an actual, tangible discrimination against agriculture, of 40 

 per cent annually. It does not inure to commerce or manufacture, as 

 both these great interests are very materially injured by it. No class is 

 benefited except the exporter ; but it is, or should be, the concern of 

 all, because it is sapping the foundation of this government and, by the 

 legal sanction of absolute wrong, producing a contempt for law and gov- 

 ernment favorable to the growth of sentiments of anarchy and socialism 

 that threaten the stability of modern civilization. Every useful and pro- 

 ductive interest in this country should be deeply interested in securing a 

 flexibility for the volume of money that will be a guarantee against this 



