THE FARMERS' LUMBER QUESTION. 41 



CHAPTER IX. 



THE FARMERS' LUMBER QUESTION. 



FREE Traders, in organizing their campaign against the tariff, 

 do not hope, and can not expect, to accomplish their intended 

 end by a single sweeping blow. This necessitates attack upon a few 

 particular interests at a time, the choice naturally falling upon those 

 which touch human needs and uses at most numerous points, such 

 as salt, iron, cottons and woolens, lumber, and the like. It has 

 been represented to the farmer, over and over again, that he is the 

 especial victim of Protective duties, and that those on lumber fall 

 upon him with the pressure of a heavy yet unnecessary burden. 

 All these allegations relate to matters of experience; hence the 

 issue which has been raised can be settled only by an appeal to the 

 facts. The real question is the purchasing power of farm produce. 

 We have shown that wheat buys about twice as much salt under 

 Protection as it did under partial Free Trade. Let us now see 

 how much corn another great staple of the West has been 

 required, under these opposite systems of tariff, to pay for a thou- 

 sand feet of lumber. 



Here we can not properly compare the three years 1872, 1873, 

 and 1874 with the three years 1856, 1857, and 1858, as we did in 

 the case of salt, because the great Chicago fire, Oct. 9, 1871, 

 created a phenomenal demand, sudden and long-continued in its 

 needs, for every kind of saw-mill product, at once advancing prices 

 to unprecedented figures, maintained many months, and amount- 

 ing to an almost immediate rise in value of 15.79 to 25 per cent. 

 To accept such exceptional prices as a standard for comparison 

 with other years, not complicated with extraordinary circum- 

 stances, would be as fallacious and as absurd as to take the price 

 of cotton in New York, in 1864, with a range of 69 to 180 cents 



