126 THE farmer's relationships. 



although the farmer is the only man necessary to our exist- 

 ence, and as such certainly entitled to something more than 

 what may hapjjen to be left after satisfying others, yet it is to 

 other classes, after all, that we are indebted for what really 

 makes existence worth supporting, and they are entitled to 

 their due. To this fundamental trouble is added the fact that 

 the farmer, through ignorance, largely wilful, of facts, and his 

 unwillingness to work with his fellows, does not in the main 

 succeed in getting what he should and might have. 



As for the " remedies " proposed or possible for this state 

 of things I have not much to say here. Many of them are 

 discussed in other chapters. Many of those proposed by the 

 farmers themselves I do not think of much value. But, as 

 I have already said, it is not the wdsest farmers that we hear 

 most from. Those who speak, who are usually the indebted, 

 do not seem to rae to always understand their own case. A 

 great physician once said to me that he never knew a man 

 who was smart enough to correctly count his own pulse. 

 Perhaps most of us are not good judges of our own ailments. 

 The articulate farmers do not say that they are weak and 

 erring, or recognize that with the end of our new lands the 

 era of speculative farming is over in America, and that of 

 close business methods begun, but attribute their trouble 

 rather vaguely to "rings," "combinations," and "monopolies." 

 Now these agencies, so far as they exist, can inflict economic 

 injury upon the farmer only by lowering the price of what 

 he has to sell, or raising that of what he has to buy. As a 

 matter of fact they have not done the latter, for all commodi- 

 ties, even transportation, which the farmer has to buy, are now 

 lower than at the date when any long-standing debt was 

 incurred. The farmer must have estimated, if he estimated 

 at all, upon paying more for what he buys than he does 

 pay, and in so far as the prices of what he has to sell have 

 fallen, they have done so largely as the result of cheaper 

 production and of overproduction in whicli he has himself 

 participated, often induced by the representations of bright 

 and unscrupulous men that the impossible would happen. 

 I have little faith in the legislative remedies to which farmers 



