80 FARMERS TAXED TO DEATH. 



that " the cotton planter and wheat and corn grower pay the 

 duty not only on their own clothing, wares, and implements, but 

 also the increased price upon the goods and tools used by the 

 carpenter, blacksmith, and workmen they employ." These mis- 

 representations were made in the face of the fact that Canadians 

 pay the duties, amounting to eight or ten million dollars annually, 

 on nearly everything they export into the United States ; and that 

 other foreigners either share with the importer the payment of the 

 duty, or sometimes pay it all, the cases not being numerous where 

 the entire duty falls upon the American consumer. For all that, 

 falsehood was heaped upon falsehood, and repetition hastened on 

 with the work of reiteration, until Western farmers were aroused 

 into solicitude, urged into scrutiny of their surroundings, and 

 awakened to a sense of oppression. After due search, they dis- 

 covered this oppression, not in our system of Protection to home 

 industry, but where it really was in the grinding tax of transpor- 

 tation to distant markets, and in the cost of maintaining a vast num- 

 ber of supernumerary middlemen. Our farmers have learned that 

 he who must go to a foreign market for the sale of his surplus 

 must himself pay the cost of getting there, be that cost what it may. 

 The granger movement for a redress of grievances has been the 

 consequence an outcome neither intended nor expected by the 

 Chicago Tribune and its Free Trade co-laborers as the result of their 

 false teachings. 



Since the day when the crusade against our tariff system was or- 

 ganized, and "The People's Pictorial Tax-payer" was so widely 

 distributed, we have had a financial crisis, and a universal de- 

 pression of industry. Fortunately, no part of the United States 

 has suffered so little from the panic as the West, and no part of 

 its population less than the agricultural classes. These facts have 

 so deeply impressed the Chicago Tribune that it felt impelled, in its 

 leading editorial article, Nov. 23, 1874, to say what follows: 



In the general talk at the East of hard times and depression of business, ac- 

 companied by the closing of mills and the reduction of working time in others, it 

 is a comfort to turn to the more cheering figures which indicate THE PROS- 

 PERITY OF THE WEST. Last winter, after the panic had stricken the 

 general business of transportation, the rates on grain were so much lower that, 

 notwithstanding the close of navigation, the movement of grain was so heavy 

 during the whole winter that the surplus of the Northwest standing over in the 



