OUR EXPORTS OF WHEAT. 



15 



A comparison between these prices and those in the period of 

 partial Free Trade indicates a large balance of advantages in favor 

 of the policy of Protection. The average export price is some 

 eleven cents higher per bushel. We know that the common reply 

 is that these represent prices in depreciated paper money, while 

 those under the tariffs of 1846 and 1857 represent gold; but 

 there is no force in this objection. Our farmers who sold their 

 wheat in the Chicago market during the years before the war must 

 have a vivid recollection of the "red-dog," the "stump-tail," and 

 the "wild-cat" currency of the period. It is sheer nonsense to 

 talk of such paper money having been equivalent to gold ; a circu- 

 lating medium whose value was fixed from time to time, by edicts 

 of the railroad companies, as receivable by them for freights and 

 fares ; a currency that often was uncurrent a hundred miles from 

 home, and that would not buy New York exchange without suffer- 

 ing a considerable shave. Who wants to give up greenbacks or 

 national bank notes in order to get back that miserable stuff in 

 which our farmers were paid for their wheat ? 



There is another very important phase to the subject. During 

 the war, when the gold premium was so high, our farmers, who had 

 got deeply in debt amid the great prosperity claimed to have been 

 conferred upon them by partial Free Trade, were rapidly clearing off 

 mortgages and other incumbrances upon their property. Green- 

 backs being legal tenders, every dollar of them devoted by our 

 farmers to the payment of debts contracted before the war was 

 equivalent to a dollar in coin, no matter how extravagant the 



* Not separately stated in the Commerce and Navigation Report for that year. 



