If the symptoms of an unnatural and unnecessary agricultural depression were confined to the Dakotas, and Kansas, and Nebraska, the farmer student might be nonplussed in his investigations. He might be led to consider his inexperience and extravagance as the source of the disease so deeply fixed upon him. But the farmer of to-day reads and travels. A Dakota farmer, a few weeks since, visited the paternal homestead in Ohio. He found, to his surprise, that his father's farm, which fifteen years ago lay within three miles of a thriving town of two thousand inhabitants, paying an annual tax of fifteen dollars, and worth a hundred dollars an acre, now pays a tax of seventy-five dollars, and is worth but forty-five dollars an acre, although the neighboring town has increased its population to ten thousand, and is noisy with shops and factories. He found that this was not an isolated case, but a fair example of the depreciation of farm values. He was not surprised to learn that the Ohio farmers were even then gathering to organize a State alliance. A careful survey of the United States, we are sure, will measurably confirm the conclusion of the western farmer, that farming, except in those localities where it has taken on the form of market gardening, or where it yet monopolizes some specialty, is unprofitable and disappointing.
Most farmers are ready to admit that their surroundings are better and their comforts more numerous than in ancestral days, when stoves were unknown, and the women slaved over the hand-loom and spinning-wheel, when medical men bungled and schools were luxuries; but they can see with half an eye that the mighty material advances of the last half century in this country have been made to serve the rich rather than the poor, the strong instead of the weak. They do not object to railroads, and the constantly increasing facilities for travel and transportation; but they do object to laws and customs which make railroads a means of transferring the hard earnings of the farm to the coffers of money kings. The farmer has received comforts at the hands of our civilization, but he has paid a good price for them, not to the genius which created, but to the plutocrat who bought. It is not because the farmer is facing starvation that he moves politically; but because, in the midst of plenty, comparative poverty is his portion. As a legitimate result of the civilization in the presence of which he lives, his tastes have improved, and his desire for education and comfortable living has increased, and with this improvement and increase has come a widening of the distance betwixt his possessions and his desires. In other words, the shadows of contrast in social conditions in our country are hourly deepening, and it is at such times that the canker of discontent eats closest. It will serve no purpose for us to spend time in condemning this spirit, and making light of it, because it is a natural result and a political fact that can only be remedied by a removal of the immediate cause. It is not possible or desirable to rid the people entirely of the spirit of discontent, but it can be so minimized that it will be no longer a menace to national life but an incentive to progress.