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largest, of course, cotton ; petroleum, grain, flour, breadstuffs, but- 

 ter, beef, cheese, lard, pork and tobacco. Agricultural products, 

 you see, make up the great body of our exports. Now the price 

 of all these agricultural productions that we don't export depends 

 necessarily on the price of those we do export, and the price of 

 those we do export are reckoned on the gold basis. Gold, we 

 will say, stands at 1.10, which makes the farmer sell his produce 

 there at the rate of 1.10 in currency for the dollar in gold. Now, 

 this which the farmer sells he sells on the gold basis, but, on the 

 other hand, the productions which he is obliged to buy — cotton 

 goods, wollen goods, boots and shoes, labor, etc., which are not ex- 

 porting in any quantity — have their price determined necessarily 

 by the state of the market at home, and this market at home esti- 

 mated in currency, has shown a rise in prices with which you are 

 all familiar. It has been the policy of the government to keep 

 down the price of gold by occasional sales of the reserve in the 

 treasury, but the government has not been able to keep down the 

 prices of these other things. It is certainly within bounds to say 

 that there has been a rise in prices of fifty per cent. Now put 

 these two facts together. For what you sell, you sell in gold at a 

 reduced valuation by this proceedure ; for what you buy, you have 

 got to pay in currency at the full valuation. Gold at 1.10 raises 

 prices to 1.50, which makes the difference of forty per cent, which 

 you are obliged to sacrifice in every bargain you make. There is 

 the simple fact that presses upon the farmers of to-day. There is 

 forty per cent, of their substance wrung from them by this mis- 

 chievous currency and the course of the treasury department at 

 Washington. The farmers understand that they are burdened, 

 but a great many of them don't know for the life of them why, 

 and so they go on talking about it in a blind fashion, saying this 

 is the trouble and that. 



Some say it is the railroads. I don't propose to take up in de- 

 fense of the railroads, but our tariff of fifty per cent, on iron, the 

 rise in wages and the higher cost of construction, freights, etc., 

 have made them far from profitable. Of course, they bear heavi- 

 ly on the Western farmer, who must get his grain to market, but 

 those men are foolish counsellors who try to delude the farmers in 

 the West with the thought that the whole trouble is with the rail- 



