cars were to be seen in Shanghai, Constantinople, in Bagdad. And this domestic mastery and world expansion had come in spite of the Wilson tariff of 1914, the first reduction since Abraham Lincoln. This financial expansion had come at home and elsewhere, contrary to the earnest protests of bankers against the Federal Reserve banking system. The railroads, put under close national surveillance by Wilson in 1914, wore out their tracks hauling war supplies and were taken under immediate Government management in 1918-to win the war. And finally business men, complaining that the Government was hostile to them, procured the Webb dumping law whereby American exporters might unite their strength and drive European business men off their former trading grounds-even their allies in the war. Surely there had never been anything comparable to it; twenty thousand millionaires, products of the war, hustling and elbowing one another in the great cities of the country; hundreds of thousands of fat-pursed tourists waiting at the end of the struggle to "see Europe." How stood things with the American farmers? They planted great crops in obedience to the call of the Government. They increased their operations, doubled the vast investment in fertilizers, put money in the banks, bought costly clothes and traded in lands at two to four hundred dollars an acre, as if the war would last forever-farmers less able to forecast the future than others.

23

The German machine collapsed in November, 1918. After a moment of

drunken prosperity, wheat began to fall in price. In two years wheat sold for less than a dollar a bushel; pigs sold on the farm in 1918 at fifteen cents a pound, in 1921 at seven cents; cotton that had been hurried to market at thirty-five cents a pound stood upon the gin-yards of the South without purchasers; horses that had brought two hundred dollars each could hardly be disposed of in 1922 at fifty dollars. It was the third great deflation of the American farmer; and farmers stood aghast at the prospect; yet the world stood in need of their products.

Europeans were hungry and illclad, ready to enter their mills and supply the United States with cheap goods, buy American wheat and pork at fair prices and begin the payment of their loans in the products of their industry. Could American farmers connect with European consumers? Could the American Government make arrangements with recent allies for the payment of huge war-debts? Both depended upon politics, though the farmer, slow as ever, was not adept in the game and art of politics. He knew less in 1920 than his predecessors had known in the days of Andrew Jackson, yellow schoolhouses to the contrary notwithstanding.

Woodrow Wilson returned from Paris with his doubtful treaty in his pocket. The great leaders of the United States were his bitterest enemies, industrial men and bankers, railway managers and the manufacturers of new chemicals. It was the one time in history to support the party in power and conserve the moral fruits of the war. But in the hot temper of 1920 business men and

all others who feared the party that would have "made the world safe for democracy," carried the national elections upon a plurality unknown in times past; the farmers of the West were urged by the "Chicago Tribune" and other great newspapers to vote as their fathers had shot fifty-five years before; and farmers hastened to register the decree of their superiors, voting the ticket of Abraham Lincoln. It was "back to normalcy."

Normalcy meant a dependent farmer class. The expected happened. Representative Joseph W. Fordney of Michigan-most of his State engaged in farming-wrote a new tariff. There was no help in it for the farmer. But every class of industrialists had its schedules and rates so arranged that Europeans could hardly hope to sell a jack-knife in the United States. With a tariff written by the beneficiaries of the tariff, the various groups of competing manufacturers were finally able to work out combinations among themselves whereby they set the prices of their output, set them high enough to take care of labor, which had come into a powerful position during the war. The Fordney tariff was like that of 1864 and after. It gave Europeans little chance to sell to American farmers and take American farm products in payment. The greatest of all privileges since slavery,

was secure.

The railroad managers, resenting the thought of government management, asked a new transportation act. They were successful. They were to be permitted to fix charges according to what they thought was fair. A little later the Interstate

Commerce Commission ruled that five and three quarters per cent on railway investments was a fair return. The great railway systems of the country were now reasonably secure and able to pay their workers wartime or near wartime wages, the Government itself sponsor for their rulings and urging great railway combinations. Two vast interests

industry and transportation-safe under the national roof. The Federal Reserve system, already enacted, served the financial leaders in the vast affair of wet-nursing business of every kind, the employees of banks being safe with wages and salaries in keeping with the new industrial prosperity. Financial autonomy was secure. It only remained to put organized labor in a safe position.

In the midst of the war skilled workers were able to perfect their machinery and to become one of the interests of the country, always consulted in Washington when anything was to be done. At the end of the war a comprehensive immigration act was placed on the statutes. It limited the labor supply of the country by hundreds of thousands a year; and with one or two strategic strikes the leaders of workingmen, albeit these were not wholly successful, gained the sort of recognition from industry, transportation and banking which caused business to acquiesce and leave workingmen to control the price of a day's labor, the conditions of work and the regulation of apprenticeships. Skilled labor had arrived. The leaders of labor soon set up banks of their own and took on the manners and bearing of business. The country must support them. Had not the three million

enemies of all privilege in 1776 gone a long way in 1922-the greatest country in the world, every class but farmers and unorganized city folk duly screened against the winds of adverse economic fortune? Wilson died the next year.

The farmers, with European markets lamed, were left to take their chances in the American market. If they sold wheat or cotton it was at the European price, less the freight. If they sold milk and cream, the price was fixed by city distributors. A crop of apples selling in the cities for fifteen dollars a barrel, retail, hardly brought the apple-grower three dollars a barrel, in 1926 one dollar a barrel. With the American market a fairly closed monopoly, business men weathered the drastic deflation and held their heads high in the great world outside; farmers compelled to sell in competition with farmers all over the world sold at the lowest international prices and were then compelled to buy their supplies in a protected market at prices set by those who sold.

21

It was time for the farmer to seek the wilderness again; but there was no wilderness, no free lands into which he might retreat and start afresh. His money in the bank vanished; his wartime debts increased in value, war taxes bearing heavily upon his land if he was a landowner, upon his articles of consumption if he was a mere tenant-the vast Federal debt to be paid out of the earnings of working folk, Europeans unable to pay in gold and excused from paying in kind. Once more the farmer was paying a heavy part of the cost of a great war, statesmen all against him,

"demagogues" his only friends. A few typical prices will show the inequality of the economic life and show how nearly wartime prices prevailed to the very end of 1925, conditions not different in 1928: Men's suits of farmers' clothes sold in 1914 at $14, in 1920 at $41, in 1925 at $27.64; men's work shoes in 1914 sold at $2.30 a pair, in 1920 at $5 and in 1925 at $3.56 and rising since that time; double wagons sold in 1914 at $66, in 1920 at $155 and in 1925 at $138.26. It was the same with blankets, sheetings, cooking utensils and wire fencing. There was some decline from the peak figures of 1920, but no return to the low prices of 1914. But in every major article of farm output deflation meant a return to the levels of pre-war days. Can the farmer survive under such conditions? Unable to organize in solid phalanxes, unwilling to forget his fifty-year old sectional dislikes, illassisted by the education which the schools and the press give him, is not his lot peasantry, the poor lot of most of our ancestors in Europe?

If one looks over the wide landscape, South or West, there appear empty and dilapidated houses and shabby fences; fields giving certain evidence of poor economy and decided erosion. There are automobiles to be sure and good roads, both of which tend to raise land values without raising the prices of farm products and at the same time to hurry farmer's children to the towns and cities. Over half the farmers are now tenants; and half of those who own lands are bound fast by mortgages and hardly able to obtain credit in the farm loan banks set up for their benefit. There are some suc

cessful farmers, owners of large tracts of land with tractors and machinery and day laborers to man them: such men earn somewhat more than their pay-rolls and the taxesmen who hold on to the homes of their forebears or men who, having made fortunes in industry, have retired to broad acres in the country, like English business men of the eighteenth century. But these are not the farmers who made the United States, the self-sufficing, home-owning folk who shouted and roared and drank bad whisky in the days of Jackson and Clay. They are business men, masters of fortunes and the labors of others, not unlike the lords of plantations put down in the Civil War. Why a great war to put them down?

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If one turns to the city. There is so much wealth and refinement that twenty-year old houses must be torn down to make room for more fashionable houses; new styles in apart ments cause old apartments to be abandoned after ten or fifteen years; a fancy for antique furniture sets everybody seeking antiques and starts fresh manufacturies for the making of ancient furniture at top prices. In the loop of Chicago or on Manhattan Island great business houses built in the days of Cleveland and McKinley are torn down to make room for sky-scrapers, land selling at five hundred dollars a square foot. Nothing is stable, neither ancient landmarks nor ancient families make any appeal. Wealth is so vast, income so great that anything can be ventured.

It is a marvelous picture; and who blames the farmer's son if he aban

dons the holdings of his father, the farmer's daughter if she hurries to the slavery of clerkships and waitresses' jobs in the city? Two million farmer folk have abandoned the land since 1920, six hundred thousand in the year 1926. The city and not the wilderness is now the appeal, the ancient longing for a freehold, a place where one is one's own master no longer exists. Land values are high although immigrating Europeans no longer wish to be landowners; they prefer to crowd the streets of the city, looking to industry for wages, for cottages on long, dreary dirty streets. It is a new United States that now lifts its head in the great world, ready to lend money, to lead in new ways or to conquer a weary or a backward world.

The farmer is on the way to peasantry. Is there a desire to deflect his course? Do the powerful in the United States wish to deflect it? I doubt it. But if they do, the remedy is not an easy one. A declining rate of tariff taxation would give the greatest relief. But a steadily falling tariff would lead to violent business protests. A reclassification of freight rates would assist; but railroad managers and their army of workers would resist to the extreme-there might be nation-wide strikes. A decentralization of accumulated capital, already dangerous in its greatest center, would take some money from imperialistic ventures in foreign lands and make money easier in farm loan banks; but financiers would make their powerful opposition felt in a moment. More important, the city markets might be opened to farmers, but an army of distributors and middlemen would resent the first move

that was made and denounce it as socialism. Some governmental assistance might be given to the organization of the farmers and to the seasonal warehousing of their surplus; and this would mean much. And a statesmanlike flood control in the Mississippi Valley would mean even more, to future generations of farmers. But no one of these remedies would be sufficient; all of them, duly applied, would halt for a time the rapid pace of farmers toward tenantry, merely halt the pace. At any rate, a people with an annual income of ninety billions ought to be able to lend some assistance to its farmers with the lowest average effective income since the inauguration of George Washington.

But there is little serious thought in the capital. The President glibly vetoes farm bills without offering better ones. The Secretary of the Treasury is bent upon lowering the income tax in the higher brackets by $225,000,000; the Democratic leaders would go him one better and reduce the tax by $290,000,000— hardly a thought here of the misery and the squalor in Alabama or Dakota farmsteads. Nobody thinks of accumulating a surplus, in these years of surpassing abundance in business, to finance remedies for agricultural ills; and many able men even declare there are no ills, and bid the farmer "keep out of politics," keep out of the house of his fathers! Two million farmer folk

abandoned their lands between 1920 and 1926. No farm problem? The present vast industrial privilege is the result of a hundred years of business men in politics. The railway leaders have been in politics since 1850, and they operate now under the protecting law of 1920. There has never been a time when bankers were not in politics, and the great army of financial men are now protected and guided to steady and increasing profits by positive law. Even the labor organizations are shielded by State and national law. "Let the farmer keep out of politics."

Everybody but the maker of the country has a right to governmental assistance. The victim of every deflation for a hundred and fifty years, the tough-fibered, red-necked tiller of the soil, with no wilderness left him as an asylum, must, like the Indian "march on," or reverse his course and hasten to the city, seek a place under the labor roof and endeavor to exploit his fellows left behind; or he must stick to his dunghill, grip his peasant's hoe and doff his dirty cap to superiors who command him-the rôle that twenty generations of his forebears played on the ancient hills and plains of Europe. A marvelous evolution, devolution of the American farmer. "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath."