STATE CON VENT ION—REPUBLICAN-DEMOCRACY. 177 
turist has to purchase for consumption in his business, or in the 
support of his family, have been increased from forty to eighty 
, per cent, in the interval. When, moreover, it is considered, that 
of the corn, wheat, pork or beef, thus produced at a disadvantage, 
one-third, one-half, or two-thirds, according to bulk or location, 
must go to pay the charges of transportation from the farm to 
tide-water, it will not seem strange that, despite our extraordinary 
agricultural endowment, this great department of industry should 
have made such scanty increase during the constitutional decade 
just closed.” David A. Wells, late special commissioner of reve¬ 
nue, a more partizan, but reliable witness, adds another cause : 
11 The grain power of the western, and the cotton planter of the 
southern United States, receive for their entire product the gold 
price which Mark Lane, in London, is willing to give on the one 
hand, and Manchester on the other. If now the American agri¬ 
culturist were able to purchase all his labor and commodities at 
the current gold prices of London and Manchester, he would ex¬ 
perience no detriment. But this is the very thing he is not al¬ 
lowed to do, or in other words, he disposes of all that he has to 
sell in accordance with a foreign standard of prices; but he buys 
all that he consumes—his implements, boots, shoes, clothing, su¬ 
gar, tea, etc.—in accordance with a domestic standard, artificially 
enhanced by an average tariff of forty per cent, on all imports, 
and a depreciated fluctuating currency regulating exchanges.” 
Beturning now to General Walker’s figures, we may add two 
other facts that have had an influence to weigh down and discour¬ 
age the farming class. There has been in the last decade a marked 
falling of in the number of common laborers and an increase of 
forty percent, in the trading class. On the one hand the demand 
for farm labor exceeds the supply; and on the other, the farmers, 
as part of the people of the “ United States,” in the words of Gen¬ 
eral Walker, “are maintaining a body of persons not less numer¬ 
ous than the standing army of the British Empire, and with a far 
greater number of dependents in the way of wives and children, 
than are charged to the officers and soldiers of that army, all in 
excess of the legitimate demands of trade.” 
Here then are what men who do not belong to the agricultural 
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