production which industrial men now seek to apply on a world scale. They opened new lands all the way to the Pacific; they made use of the new machines which enabled one man to do the work formerly done by five men: they raised wheat and corn, steers and hogs everywhere, and flooded the markets of Europe with low-priced products. Thus they ruined the farmers of England and Germany, peasant farmers who sent their sons and went themselves into the mills of their countries to manufacture cheap industrial goods which men vainly hoped to sell in the United States at low prices. What farmers did not sell in Europe, they sent to those wonderful markets in American cities, the railroads taking such toll as they thought fit to take. The price of farm products was generally fixed by the city buyers, never by the farmers, and it was rarely as high as the European markets paid. A shipment of lambs sometimes failed to pay the cost of transportation and commission charges; a carload of apples hardly netted twenty-five cents a barrel to the farmer. Beeves brought into the Chicago markets rarely yielded a profit of two per cent to the shipper. Flooding the European market and ruining European farmers brought little gain; supplying the domestic market often brought nothing at all; the farmer was angry, sometimes desperate. How did things work out with industrial and financial men?

The workers in the mills, the petit traders, the clerks and the bookkeepers returned like others to their tasks. In the flush months that followed the surrender of Lee, every one found employment, the tide of

immigration from Europe reaching into the hundreds of thousands, thus increasing the market for industrial goods. But in a little while prices began to fall. Pig-iron dropped from $46 a ton in 1866 to $17 in 1878 and $13 in 1896, almost as bad as cotton or grain. But coal, a constituent of pig-iron, also fell in price from $10 a ton to $2.75. A suit of clothes, a drill, a plow or a pair of shoes sold at reduced prices in every country store; the decline was, however, ten or twenty per cent, not a half or two thirds of its former value. Industry simply discharged workers, ran on half time or closed doors. A railroad company or a bank, indispensable public utilities, ceased to declare dividends and sometimes reduced wages to lower scales. They did not operate for the mere "board and housing" to which the farmers were reduced. The hard times, the great debts and the natural sectional hatreds gave rise to commotions, acrimonious political campaigns. Was there no way to equalize the burdens of economic life?

George Pendleton, "gentleman George," of Ohio proposed a remedy: pay the national debt in paper; reduce the tariff by half; and bring the railroads and banks under strict Federal control. It was the Ohio idea and John Sherman, Republican, of Ohio, as well as Thomas A. Hendricks, Democrat, of Indiana favored the program. It was a new form of Hamilton's scaling of the debts of his day, of Madison's plan of an even more drastic scaling; half the States in the country had either repudiated or scaled debts, and Pennsylvania was paying her creditors in green

many young leaders like William Allison who cried every day and every year, "Down with monopoly and pools and privilege." There was no remedy save through organization—politics. Samuel J. Tilden rose in New York in 1876 and promised to remedy the tariff privilege. The payment of debts in greenbacks he thought no relief at all-the United States being already a part of the European financial complex. The Westerners accepted him doubtingly, but Southerners voted for him with enthusiasm a great reform. But Samuel J. Randall, Pennsylvania protectionist then in the Speaker's chair of the House of Representatives, managed a deal which after a long struggle seated a Republican protectionist in the White House!

Richard Bland of Missouri, a Democrat, and William Allison of Iowa, a Republican, irreconcilable insurgents, managed a bipartizan combination of South and West in 1878 and gave to the farmers whatever relief was to be had from the issue of great quantities of silver coin-a modified form of cheap money so often tried in colonial and later American social conflicts. In 1884 Grover Cleveland of the western end of New York rose, like Tilden, and tried to weaken the hold of industry upon the Government. He failed, but he offered again in 1892 and received a great majority of the votes of the country. His tariff reform was defeated by Arthur Pue Gorman, a Maryland Democratic chief who, like Randall, was a better advocate of privilege than leader of a reform party. Cleveland went out of office without a party. But the farmers, at the worst of their long post-war deflation,

were frantic. Revolution was in the air.

A young, half-educated, handsome Nebraskan was a member of the House of Representatives. He entered upon a crusade on behalf of Western farmers. He stirred Southern voters to a great enthusiasm; ancient leaders like Vance of North Carolina and Harris of Tennessee, hustled off the national stage. West and South men talked less of the Civil War and more of the strange outcome of Lincoln's war for democracy. The new Populist party was about to join the Democrats; a wing of the Republican party bolted at St. Louis in 1896 and made ready to support the Boy Orator of the Platte, while John Hay, gentle aristocrat in Cleveland, talked of the dangers of lamp-posts to conservative chiefs in case of a farmer victory. Bryan appeared at the doors of the national Democratic convention at Chicago. Handsome and resourceful, he managed to have himself seated against the will of the old order. He made a speech not unlike that of Patrick Henry in 1775, calling for war upon all the privileges of the time: a radical readjustment of the tariff; prompt Federal control of all the great railways, already combined into powerful systems and allied to the national banks; positive outlawry of the industrial trusts, flourishing under the ægis of the war tariff; the issue of silver money in quantities limited only by the supply of the silver mines; and, like many another American politician, he declared war upon the "tyrant Great Britain, forcing her gold system of finance into the free countries of the world." The convention adopted the young orator's

platform, the delegates of New York filing out of the great hall in protest and amidst the jeers of Western and Southern delegates alike. It was a demonstration of the farmers on the war-path: the last great fight the farmers have ever staged, the last they are likely to stage. They then composed seventy-five per cent of the people of the country.

The Republicans now assumed for the first time positive championship of all the privileged groups, toying a little with free silver and talking loudly about the value of sound money. Their managers raised unprecedented sums of campaign money; they enlisted the representatives of the great companies in their earnest "campaign of education," Mark Hanna the chairman of the Republican national committee. No accounting has ever been made of the cost of the first great fight against the farmers. The Republicans reminded the country that Bryan was too young to be trusted in the Presidency; he was ill-informed as to the intricacies of life and history. That was not the reason he was hated, which history has tended to confirm. Frightened conservatives reopened the ancient war on the South, the socalled "bloody shirt" waved on platforms all over the West. It was too much for Ohio and Iowa farmers; their hatreds, rather than their interests, swung them back into the "party of Abraham Lincoln." The Boy Orator was defeated. But there was to be another war!

world, led to moderate improvement in the price of wheat, corn, pigs and beef; farmers, still ill-educated in the affairs of the world and less militant than they had been in the days of Jackson, accepted the dogma that the party in power is responsible for good times. They came to think that the Republicans, like the Kaiser in Berlin, had an understanding with God Almighty. But in July and August, 1914, the Germans, the Austrians and the Russians started 'the flames of the greatest of all wars. It was not long before pigs sold at fabulous prices and cotton, after a short depression, rose to values not known since the close of the Civil War. Beef and flour were rushed from the Middle West to the great, red caldron of war. Cities grown great under the ægis of tariffs, of combinations of railways, of associations of industrial corporations and of banking consolidations-all drawing many millions of immigrants from Europe, millions of farmers' sons, into their hustling east and west sides-were now ready to lend a mighty hand, which withheld, would surely have insured the success of the German program. Thus the undemocratic powers of the United States were about to become the saviors of whatever democracy there was in Europe! But the farmers were prosperous. Their very prosperity blinded their vision. Business men were more prosperous and probably more blinded still to the real needs of the world: farmers in Fords, business men in Packards, all hastening hither and thither, filling the roads with reckless drivers and crowding pedestrians off the highways-amazing prosperity.

Would it last? Four billions of

American debts to Europeans were quickly paid in high-priced wheat or beef or shells and guns for the fields of battle. Other billions were soon loaned to England, France and Italy; hundreds of thousands of Americans angry that as many billions were not loaned to Germany. A great body of Americans would have joined England at the start; another great body would have joined the Germans; and some millions of Irishmen were almost willing to see their adopted country beaten if England could be ruined. Slowly a Democratic President came to think that the cause of democracy in the United States was bound up with the cause of the enemies of Germany, the slaughter of five hundred thousand Frenchmen at Verdun reminding men of the terrors of war under modern conditions. Unable to bring the powers to negotiate

terms of mutual concessions, Woodrow Wilson slowly led the country into the conflict, a war for democracy a great army of Americans making ready to return to their ancient homes in the hope of teaching the world a better way. It was 1917.

The price of wheat rose to two and a half dollars a bushel, farmers angry that they did not receive three dollars. Cotton rose almost to forty cents a pound, Southern farmers contending for fifty cents. Pigs were taken at fifteen cents a pound on the hoof. A suit of clothes that had sold for twenty-five dollars in 1913, sold for seventy-five dollars in 1918. Shoes that had been dear at five dollars were now easily sold at fifteen. Copper was worth seventeen cents a pound and pig-iron brought $46 a ton. Carpenters and rivet workers

received fifteen to twenty-five dollars for an eight hour day. Farmers growing rich paid their help three to five dollars a day. It was war, the third bonanza of the American farmer. Emigrants from the Middle West came back to their farms; negro workers hastened from Southern farms where they received five dollars a day for picking cotton to Northern cities where they took the places of soldiers for ten dollars a day. Men were so busy in the cities that they adopted the device of daylight saving, so active on the farms that they submitted to such an absurd system. Europe was exhausting itself in one of its periodic conflicts, millions of men being killed and all existing property being consumed or hypothecated; the United States, spending much, became overnight the richest nation the world had ever

seen.

At the beginning the country owed Europeans as much as four billions; in 1919 European governments and European citizens owed the people and the government of the United States as much as fifteen billions, since increased to more than twenty billions. In 1914 the foreign trade of the United States was nearly four billions a year; in 1918 it was more than nine billions. The annual income of the country was estimated in 1914 at thirty billions; in 1918 it was sixty-eight billions, now ninety billions. American industrial men were the most powerful in the world; bankers were setting up hundreds of branches in various parts of the world; oil men were the masters of the Mexican fields and they were crowding the Russians and the English in the Black Sea region; Ford