PJ THE FARMER. As He Was and as He Is. IS ROBBED. HOW HE Stupendous Decline in Farm Products. A PERNICIOUS FINANCIAL POLICY. Evils of Contraction--The Concentration of Wealth Rise and Fall of Goid--The Effect of the Free Colnage of Sliver. What Gold Monometallism Stands For, An Honest Payment of Debts—The Help Offered by the Ballot. By JOHN H. BEADLE. The accompanying illustra- tions are from New York newspapers of recent date. They are published to show the popular idea of the per- sonality of the American far- mer in the gold stronghold of the country. I will pictures, Twenty-five years ago the American farmer was a king. him. Orators praised him. Edward Everett held up an ear of gold en corn before his audience and eulogized Pa the grower in Aq such eloquent AR wordsthat storms of applause shook the hall We loved to read and quote the old stir- ring lines telling how ‘‘the em- battled farmers stood’ at Lex- ington and Con- cord, and it was universally Truth. agreed that they were the salvation of the land. They were the hardy yeomanry, the free and independent workers, and even such for- eign visitors as De Tocqueville went out of their way to describe the happy condition of the landowning farmer in this country Washington gloried in being a farm- Our greatest statesmen passed their their own farms, among their horses and cattle. They delighted in rural pleasure, they worked and personally di- rected their and from a season of this kind of life and close tact with the people they came back to Washington wonderfully freshened by having lived close to the heart of nature, mon American and more ocratic and more in love with their own land. Their N. ¥. World names were coupled in the popular lore with the names of their estates. It was Washington of Mouut Vernon, Jeffer. son of Monticello, Clay of Ashland, Webster of Marshfield and Jackson of The Hermitage Where is that farmer now? The Vilifleation, He is the gibe and the sneer of every clown who can get on the city stage in : spotted breeches He is the butt of vile jokes in the Hi the the invite your altention to two er. vacations on ‘ mploye 8, con- ary Gell city saloons. shares with mule and mother - the darky, the rusty stovepipe and the tramp as stock material for cheap paragraph era. He is brought the stage of overy low theater as the stock vie tim of all the stale old practical jokes. “Hayseed'' and Wayback’ and “‘ Jay" are his regular titles, even among culti on vated people, and in the slums * ‘farmer’ | is one of the vile epithets which provoke a fight He figures in the illustrated comics os a half savage. Look at the pictures of the typical farmer in the New York papers and see something Poets sang about | in - law, | iantation | the | | self respect whisker, but looks like a wisp of weather beaten hay. This is the farmer of today as the | people of the cities are taught to con. sider him. And why this change? It is because be has been systematically robbed for 80 years and has submitted to the robbery and voted for more of it. He is despised because hoe has consented to his own degradation. His very virtues have been made the means of his degradation. The farmers, -and especially the men who till their Owl acres, are our great conservative clags. They dread revolution. They love their country with an impassioned ardor born of close contact with the soil —an ardor of pa- triotism which some writers have thought im- possible in men reared in cities Naturally, there. fore, the north. ern farmers stood by their govern. ment in the great civil war. The Republican party was in power and acquired an im- prestige by the successful issue of the con- flict. Naturally N.Y. Herald. again, therefore, the great majority of farmers credited all good things to that party. They could not believe that the party of Lincoln and Sumner and other friends of humanity would do aught of injustice mense The Robbery. The war tariff was prolonged in time of peace despite solemn promises to the contrary Em pires of land and hundreds of mil lions of money were given to great orpora- tions. Credit Mo- bilier, the Indian whisky star we, the ng ring, the grand wuld chemers Ou top of all the rest comes a finan ich has w f me } 10 system wh oO the valu ontain | | | | | 1ded 80 per cent | mey and depreciated | he farmer's products in | and at the part he It is assumed as a matter urs: that Wall street should strive for a rise in stocks, that manufacturers should lobby for a higher V7 tariff, that th Pacific ay companies should payment All othe nd lobby t te hi vii lt rm : AERA i i# denounced as & traitor. " Ril I evade raise good Christians, he bare hint that ou vote for restoring better price for crops, the try rings with frantic cries of rage aud denun ciation The farmer has sul mitted too long He has the respect of those who have robbed him, and it ; much to be feared that in great part he has lost his own His poverty has become wn and r— wp ~ lost in is reproach. The Aflliction of Abundance. jut there fias been so great an in- cronse in production. Now, why should the farmer com : plain that prices i gO aowh | mize of the crop as the And you ROR how oan i prove that elevat- | ing the condition tof the farmer will elevate that, of other labor ern?’ It is impossible to raise the agri cultural class of any country without raising all the other classes who de- pend on Jabor for a living It is not absolutely ime possible to press down the agricul tural laborer and yet leave the city Ia. borer unaffected, but it is very unlikely. farmer, however, least signs of | of i 3 | a pound AT | sold there | lov | is that prices have fallen so fast that | .aral department has shown that the he gets very much less money for a very | American people see eating consider big crop than ho formerly got for a small one, Thus the bounties of Provi- dence are turned into curses and he is coming to look upon abundance as an affliction, Let me call your attention to some figures, In 1881 the farmers pro- | | | | | | { duced 416,481,000 bushels of oats and | received therefor #8108,108,070; in 1883 they produced 571,802,400 bushels and received for it $187,040,204; in 1889 they produced 751,515,000 bushels and received $171,781,008, and so on down, the amount rising ng the money received for it fell, till 1895, when they pro- duced 824,448, 587 bushels of oats and received therefor $1638, 355,068, And the population has increased 70 per cent. In 1870 we produced 1,004, - 225,000 bushels of corn, worth $001,8890,080; in 1893 1,619,490,- 131 bushels, worth §501,025,- 627, and in 1805 2,151, 188,580 bushels, worth $567,500,108, Overproduction, you say, but divide the bushels by the population each year, and you will find that per capita the increase was quite small, and in such years as 1800 and 15804, when the crop was very short and the number of bushels per capita very much less than the average of several years ago, the price per bushel was still low The Decline In Value, Since 1870 the production of hay the United States increased in al most parallelism with the in crease of population, and yet the aver in has exact / - age value per ton has declined from £18.82 to $8.35. This last is the farm price as reported by the agricultural department for July; nevertheless, on the day I write this hay is selling in New York city by retail at 818 ton, which is a illustration of how your city consumer ‘'profits’’ by the loss of the farmer. Wheat is supposed to be an exception t other ox A Per beantifal untries arn shirass Has ther n any fat bogs? Every farm 18 Just now a great hog famine. And yet fat bogs in the central i 0 of the west ar selling at 8 cents verproduction of r knows that ther rity, almost a or Joss, but a few S they Has when yoars age i in | The | show | ous in proj | is going steadily sus will they are less numer ortion to population than they were, and yet the price Set downward Is a. THE SEW UNCLE SAN there an overpro N. ¥. Homald duction of land? In two-thirds of the country east of Illinois you can today buy thousands of splendid faring at what they were assessed Yor in 1570, and in some of the finest parts of New York state thoy the assessment of 15860, Farmers do not | tion is, complicate will sell you good farms ot | complain at reduced prices for products | of which there has been a very great pro- | duction, but the figures show a decline, though not so great, in articles of which there is an admitted scarcity and that the general decline is very much great. er than can be acoounted for by the amount produced. Starving Midst Plenty. But as a matter of fact is there any overproduction? Have mankind more breadstuffs than thoy can oat and more cotton than they can wear and more pork and beef than they want or more shoes than they need? Why, the largest wheat crop ever raised : : : ably loss wheat per capita than they did u few years ago, aud if you will take the annual re. purts for 20 years and deduct that used for export and seed from { the crop of cach year nud that fed to stock in late years you will flud that 70,000, 0) Ie ople unre eating only about the same amount wheat flour 55,000, 000 people did, In Europe also it has been shown that N. Y. Recorder, nearly 100,000,000 people cannot afford to eat wheat bread. They are using cheap substitutes like rye and potatoes, Are we to suppose that they do that for Enormons Losses to Agriculture, If you want to realize what enormous American farmers have sustained because of the increased — ¢\| purchasingpower NN of gold, look over the files of the gold papers be- fore this became Pu a political issue, wy had any interest in deny- In the losses n New York Sun 15808, for instance, was an f which this is an extract truth. 10, 1878 to 1808, all tho staples have been e than 13 years Ary agricultural ndary t , but the trend of onstantly downward cl ot the end of In the he Tire fn rather than trae that thers ction in the #1 sch reduction boas ing the cont of production on new machines have often dis ere but partially worn te oe efficient bable that the purchase « not siways re pon farms large f full Mines of im hinery the cost of production has un lessoned 10 per cent, but such ting joss than § per cent of the der cultivation the sggregate nies has boon slight offset by mercial OemRary in . Bot to enough "Hy the rogressively i: afing © of fpors which 1 the regios at of pr i 11 4} 1 all t denied un powad Nobody denied this As, that tinu¢ Hera the gre hat is the farmer going to do On him depends the solution fate of And now 5 ’ : jues Ww bout it f this all important issue Ihe bimetallism is in his hands Fact, One vy que stim too A Simple the farmers “But is mast the brief between fin \ Not at al election its present shape indeed it is sin gularly simple It can be reduced to two or three plain questions, perhaps to one, and that is, Has silver depreciated or gold appreciated since 18787 On their answer to that depend the votes of a million honest farmers Monometallists say gold has stood still while nll other things have cheapened We say that silver has stood almost un | changed while gold has advanced enor mously in value, and, what is more, we prove it by every line of reasoning which can be applied to the subject. That sil ver is hy natural law far more sta ble in value than gold has been proved from ge. ology, from min erslogy, from metallurgy and still more by comparing the fluctuations of prices in differ. ont countrion ritin* THE CENTRE DEMOCRAT, BELLEFONTE, PA.,, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 18u6, tions adopted the gold standard have exceoded all previously known, But here is a shuple test which the farmer can onally wyply for himself: Tux the uverage cf prices in your nefghborkood for the five years ending in 187¥(it L1 uot fair to take one year) end he average gold or greenback value of a ton onmee bar of silver at that tim Divide snd see what that silver would have bought, Do the same for five years ending with 1895, and you silver will buy more, ) and insulting none that silver has depreciated buy more of the products {or a table to help : id that the rat LIT AX SAT ECT Cw » Concentration of Wealth, A) neentration of wealth in a few hands as one cause of the farmer's poverty, but is not that worse in y v ok I. ' antics with adiflen 1 the nt systems? is uo country of high civiliza- which it is 80 bad, except per ps in or one 18 the proc been so rapid In were iy } in this sh aere w in nation a doz millionaires lay there ar 1 a 5.00 at least § ) and nrot i ably many more On this point we hav un im peachabls testimony and Early in Horr, tariff edi- York Tribune, started that protection did not cre- SiT08 his direction oa ow taken i States by Y. Herald, from an unwilling wi 1502 Hon. Roswell G tor the Now out tr 8 HS toy 1 careful of the very ery part in ker and Huntingt th of western in our Many arried vestigation farther ir shear ¢ great that | ly oon United half the { mass of Wh very rty of nen ow? the gir actually wd that laboring producers little if any more than th did in 1860. The results are simply awful Ten men in New York city today hold the credit of the United States lutely at their merey. If it their interest, they could sweep away the gold basis and preeipi- tate a panic in Wall street. But the farmer is told that all this ie none of his business and is expected to be controlled in his vote by the gold superstition abso to NRorTow were The Gold Saperstition an there bw a gold superstition? ‘How What do yon mean by such a phrase? I mean just what the words Qnply-- that a large portion of the human race has bocome poss sosacd with the a notion that pold ‘ fs infallible, » notion as degrad ing in its way as the African snake worship. Nino-tenths of the gold mono motallists in this country | boldly proclaim that, while all other commodities change in value, | does not ‘Wo know, the ravages a “that Mambo Commercial Advertiser. Jumbo is ugly and we believe that he is great.’ We laugh at the poor then, but the argument is on their sides, for it never has been mathematically proved, and it cannot be proved, that Musibo Jumbo bas not great power in the wuseen; but it has repeatedly been proved in every way open to the human intellect thas gold is o shifting and un stable standard of value, far more un stable thun silver, and that twice with in the memory of men not very old has changed in value #0 suddenly as t inte all long time contracts and dis t industrial condi locate all The Fact About Gold. Every econowmis | again and again the wal ay an NO value, though perhs greatest, wm by Iu the only one of which his tory gives some noo Professor Jes work the hapter 6, says, liness of value the m ¥ less satisfactory undard of value, than #, such as corn upon Moh ant ey od OU S1IASES sor Fran Walker of is A. the very untyy and i not « know it no permanent or : great bondholders; but ti Europ 3 W i TRIA 6 34 | ACTUALLY GOLD } iaints, J AND BELGIUM MONETIZED ’ i vail 5 id in the wrough ruptey, of distr tens a rodivisi lestructive But the monop Oh, yes, they'll Macaulay has wall erty interest were afi sands of intelligent law of gravitation ago some of the greatest s country denied that a m was black and his hair wooll) ural right to the fruits of that a married woman had her own earnings men w Only A Dungerous Basis In no specch or book published befor 1500 will you find it denied that ti volume of money and woportion t general trade are the main factors in de termining the general level of prices. It was taken for granted that the amount of money of ulti. mate redomption determined the price level. It was the founda. tion upon which all disputaffis built their argu. its § denied every day. And why?! Be entse it does not fit the arguments of those who have selfish interests to sorve. They now maintain that ‘all forms ~f Sarre: Suding checks of representative
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers