of Parliament and doubtless of the Cobden Club, with the Earl of Airlie and others of social distinction, is now visiting this country to establish an agricultural colony in Tennessee, not for common farmers, but to open a field of agricultural enterprise to the younger sons of British noblemen and gentlemen. Thus the class of men to which the members of the Cobden Club belong practically assert that there are no impediments in America to successful farming.

SUCCESSFUL

FARMING DUE LESS ΤΟ NATURAL

THAN A WISE POLICY.

ADVANTAGES

It may be said that American farming is successful on account of our superior natural advantages of cheap and fertile land and favorable climate. To this I answer, although I anticipate a more extended argument, that these are advantages only when improved by a wise economical policy. In the sugar and coffee districts of Cuba, where Nature has lavished her richest gifts of soil and climate, there exists, in the opinion of a world-wide traveler, "the most desperate and deplorable poverty on the face of the earth." The power of consumption of manufactured commodities, which so strikingly illustrates the present pros perity of our farmers, have been absolutely coeval with the establishment of the protective policy, which has given them a home market; made consumers out of competitors; saved cost of transportation of articles to be bought or sold; made manufactured products, attainable by exchange of farm products, cheap by domestic competition, and desirable, because fabricated as can only be done at home, in exact conformity to their wants. Soil and climate were just as favorable sixty years ago, when the farmers of this country were deplorably wanting in all the comforts and luxuries of life except those produced on their own farms. I myself remember seeing the wagon-trains of emigrant New England farmers on their weary march to Ohio because there

was no prospect of anything but bare subsistence at home. I remember the time when scarcely a farmer's house in the country was painted, when hardly one farmer in ten had a great coat and none wore underclothing, when even the implements of husbandry were in so little demand or so hardly obtainable that the largest manufacturer of agricultural implements in the country made but ten dozen shovels a week, while his successor now makes two thousand dozen in the same time. This was the time when General Jackson uttered his famous exclamation, "Where has the American farmer a market for his produce?" The older men of our community observe that no change in our social aspect is so remarkable as the improved condition of our agricultural population and their increased consumption of manufactured commodities, a social change sufficiently illustrated by the simple fact that our city and country populations are now absolutely undistinguishable by their dress. This change I assert, without attempting at present to fully verify my assertion, commenced with the passage of the tariff of 1816, which gave the first impulse to our manufacturers, and was first conspicuously manifest after the tariff of 1824, and its complement, the tariff of 1828,*the highest we have ever had, with rates of duty averaging forty-one per cent. upon imports subject to duty; while the prosperity of our agricultural population has continued to fall and rise with the ebb and flow of the protective policy, culminating in the long protective period of the last twenty years. If the fact of our agricultural prosperity is demonstrated, as it seems to be beyond all question by the admis sions I have cited, what becomes of the assertion that Amer ican farmers "pay more and get less than any land-tillers in the world"? This position failing, the keystone falls

*Mr. Clay says of this period, "If the term of seven years were to be selected of the greatest prosperity this people have enjoyed since the establishment of their Constitution, it would be exactly that period of seven years which immediately followed the passage of the tariff of 1824."

from the arch so skillfully builded, and the whole structure of argument topples to the ground. I might here rest my case if experience had not proved the value of accumulated argument, and if it were not instructive to consider other fallacies in this appeal no less unsound and delusive.

THE MAXIM, " BUY CHEAP AND SELL DEAR," CONSIDERED.

A fallacious argument to be successfully met must be encountered in its very premises, and free trade is delusive, because the pure assumptions upon which it rests are incautiously admitted. Such is the assumption that to "buy cheap and sell dear" is the sole criterion of the best economical policy, private and national. I maintain that, of all classes, this rule is most inapplicable to farmers, and especially to those of this country. This doctrine considers men only as purchasers and venders. It is the rule of the mere trader, or rather huckster, who occupies himself solely with the net present profit and loss result in his cash account. It is a rule only for to-day and has no notion of a to-morrow. The farmer is not a mere purchaser and vender; he is eminently a producer; although he properly seeks to make good bargains in the exchange of what he already has, it is infinitely more important for him to put himself in the way of producing more. Every farm is a little State of itself, and has or should have its own national policy, as it were, looking more to the future than the present. To the husbandman the principal object is the improvement of his farm, for it is well-known that nearly all the accumulations of our farmers are represented by their improved land. Ignoring the temporary policy of the trader, he clears forests and grubs up swamps to increase his permanent power of production. To have only in view buying cheap and selling dear would be for him to skin his land, to part with his seed-corn, to sell his hay instead of feeding it to stock, to sap the soil each year of its elements of fertility

without restoring them, to make butter of oleomargarine and sell it as "gilt-edged," to buy Brummagen axes, shovels, and hoes, to wear British shoddy-cloth instead of the sound product of his own flocks worked up in his responsible neighbor's mill, in short, to live for to-day without thought of to-morrow, and to be the grasshopper rather than the ant of the fable. This is not the sentiment of American farmers. The most stable, long-abiding, and patient of all classes, more than any others, in this country at least, they look to their interests in the long run. They, as well as our mechanics, for most farmers are both, will have the best attainable implements and tools in spite of their first cost; and what prices will they not pay for the best breeding stock, patiently biding their time for the improvement of their flocks and herds? Looking to their interests "in the long run," they rejoice to see manufac tories spring up around them, bringing them consumers, helping to pay taxes and support schools, giving employ. ment to their children, increasing the value of their land, and making them partakers of a common prosperity. They take still a broader view. The absolute owners of the country, as Vice-President Wheeler has recently well said, and, aside from the comparatively small area of the cities and villages, the proprietors of all the soil, they have a stake in the national welfare, such as no other classes have, and in fact concern themselves with its interests as no others do. They are our bulwarks against European communism, and we may hope against other no less dangerous forms of foreign propagandism. They constitute the ruling political majorities, at least in the North and West. Conservative, yet wisely progressive, controlling the political power, as they have done by their votes for the last twenty years, including the great crisis in our history, it is they who have eliminated from our institutions the last vestige of feudalism; and it is they who have incorporated into our legis

lation the principle of the new and benign gospel of political economy which considers "the laws of the production and distribution of wealth," not alone, but in their relations to human welfare. The narrow and selfish maxim of mere trade has no place in a political economy like this. How inappropriately, then, is it applied to those who make it subordinate in their private transactions, and sink it wholly in their determination of public duty, because, as "the absolute owners of the country," they are compelled to seek in the development of the nation and the welfare of all its people the first source of their own prosperity?

THE FARMERS' FIRST OBJECT TO SELL DEAR.

It should be observed, moreover, that there are obvious reasons why farmers disregard the "Golden Rule of trade" in their private transactions. To the trader it is equally important that he should buy cheap and sell dear. To the farmer it is comparatively of little importance for him to buy general commodities or manufactured products cheap, provided he gets good prices for his farm products. Obtaining the chief necessaries for subsistence for his land, it is his happy lot to be able to retrench at will, without much inconvenience, his consumption of purchased commodities. He therefore looks mainly to the prices of his own products. Their high prices to him are something more than trading results,—they are a source of personal pride, an indication of the productiveness of his farm, the assurance of future prosperity; hence the good times in which farmers rejoice are not those when goods are cheap but when farm products are high. All that the Cobden Club pretends seriously to offer him in its system is cheap goods. In vain is the net set in sight of any bird. This is a poor lure to one who can see with half an eye that in those cheap foreign goods is involved the loss of what he values above all other things, -a home market for the products of his farm.