FARMERS TAXED TO DEATH. 81 



spring was very much reduced. So great was the reduction that, at the opening 

 of navigation in the spring, the ordinary high rates of freight on the lakes for 

 moving the winter accumulation did not prevail. The Western producers, there- 

 fore, began the season of 1874 with more cash in hand, all received during the 

 winter, than had ever been known in any previous year. 



If there is any truth in what the Chicago Tribune has been 

 preaching for years, how comes it that our farmers, double-taxed 

 by the operations of an iniquitous tariff system, ground down under 

 foot by the bounties they were compelled to pay to enrich manu- 

 facturing capitalists, and more oppressed by Protective duties 

 than any other class in the country, stand forth conspicuously as 

 the most prosperous part of the population of the most prosperout 

 section, when the blighting effects of panic and crisis descend 

 upon the whole land ? Is not this a very strange and contradictory 

 result of carrying the chief burdens of tariff taxation for more than 

 thirteen years? The manufacturing capitalists of the East, whose 

 profits, so the Chicago Tribune insists, have been for a long period 

 made plethoric by constant and large exactions wrested from our 

 agricultural classes through our custom-house laws, are the greatest 

 sufferers, while their victims thrive, least of all classes feeling the 

 depression of business. All this is the reverse of what should have 

 taken place, considered from the Tribune point of view. Accord- 

 ing to deductive consequence, the manufacturing capitalists should 

 have been at the top of the heap of ruins created by the panic, 

 while their dupes and victims, the farmers, should have been at the 

 bottom. There is no reasonable explanation of this contradiction 

 between teaching and facts, except that the Tribune has been the 

 champion of a false theory of tariff, and has substituted misrepre- 

 sentations of the truth for the truth itself. 



In reality, our farmers are now just beginning to reap some of 

 the substantial benefits of a long-continued policy of Protection to 

 home industry. "Of all the pursuits of man," Mr. Carey says, 

 "the last developed is a scientific agriculture." Its development 

 must be preceded by extensively diversified industry. If we wish to 

 find the scientific farmer, we must look for him amid a teeming 

 population, and surrounded by a multitudinous development, ma- 

 terial, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic, such as the Protective 

 policy confers; for there alone can he secure those accessories 

 which enable him to repay, promptly and regularly, to the land 



