tABOR'S WRONGS. ^7 



taken into their pay the high public officials charged with 

 the making and execution of our laws; have robbed 

 the nation of a domain sufficient to constitute an empire; 

 have flooded the land with worthless stocks and other so- 

 called securities; have established a system of gambling at 

 our financial centres that has resulted in a financial crisis 

 which covered the whole land with ruin and suffering; 

 have set at defiance the laws of the land and have trampled 

 upon individual and public rights and liberties, openly 

 boasting that they are too powerful to be made amenable 

 to the law; and not content with all this, not satisfied with 

 the ruin they have wrought, they continue to petition the 

 law making power to give them still greater means of rob- 

 bing and oppressing the people. It is useless to deny the 

 facts. The issue has got to be met. We have had bounti- 

 ful seasons and our crops have been abundant. Indeed the 

 abundance of the crops has been one of the alleged causes 

 of the present hard times. The farmers have been economi- 

 cal and industrious. They have had the use- of improved 

 machinery. Yet in the face of all this, the cold stern fact 

 confronts us that the condition of the American farmer is 

 growing gloomier with each succeeding year. In fact, as 

 has been remarked by the Governor of one of our Western 

 States, and as a matter capable of proof, the railroads have 

 to a considerable extent ceased to figure on rates at which 

 they can afford to carry freight, but have made a calcula- 

 tion of what a thing can be produced' at and a bare 

 subsistence obtained by the producers, and they take the 

 difference between this figure and the market price of the 

 article at the point of delivery, for freight charges. Nor 

 is the great railway corporations the only means of op- 

 pression with which the farmer has to contend. From the 

 time that his produce leaves him until it reaches the con- 

 sumer, whether domestic or foreign, it does not move nor 

 go through a single transition that some relentless, grasping 



