COMPETITION. 83 



HOME MARKET. 



Compare the position of the different localities in 

 America, as regards the production of grain and live- 

 stock fifty years ago, with the present, and it will be 

 found that, at that time, the farmers had the advantage 

 of a home market, while to-day no locality can boast of 

 being practically a home market. During the past half- 

 century the increase of the town and city populations of 

 Massachusetts has been upwards of 100 per cent., and 

 the increase of the aggregate wealth over 200 per cent., 

 while during the same period the increase in the pro- 

 duction of live-stock has been but a trifle, and an actual 

 decline of over ^d per cent, has come about in the 

 production of grain. 



erished condition of United States farmers is due to a limited demand 

 for their products, and in a consequent decline of prices which does 

 not return him sufficient to pay for his seed and labor. We quote : 



" ' Instead of keeping up her early purchases of our new crop, 

 which were quite free in August, to bridge over the gap between her 

 {i. e., England) old and new crops, she has taken less and less as we 

 have gone into the new-crop year. Not only this, but it has been in 

 the face of steadily declining prices under an unusually heavy move- 

 ment of the crop, which has been necessitated by the impoverished 

 condition of American farmers. This has been true, not only of 

 wheat, but of every thing the farmer has raised, until prices have 

 reached a point in remote sections which hardly pay for hauling his 

 crops to market after being harvested. This is especially true of 

 corn, oats, and potatoes in the far West, where much of the crops 

 still lie on the ground unhoused, as farmers are too poor to buy the 

 lumber to crib their grain. Potatoes, which rotted so badly in the 

 East, owing to the wet autumn, seemed to have escaped in the West, 

 where they have been selling by the car-load at 20 cents a bushel 

 delivered in Chicago. Oats are selling there at 17 to 18 cents ; corn, 

 30 to 31 cents. How much is left the unfortunate farmer, after pay- 

 ing even the reduced rates of transportation the railways were com- 



