Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 February 1891 — AGRICULTURAL VALUES [ARTICLE]

AGRICULTURAL VALUES

SOME STATISTICS OF FARM MORTGAGES. .What la the Matter with the Farmer?.Protection as a Factor in Agricultural Depression—The 1 armer the Universal Burden Bearer. There has been much controversy of late about the amount of farm mortgages in the United States. The Bankers' Magazine makes the statement that the farm mortgages of Kansas amount'to $235,S 00,000; those of Indiana, $640,000,000; aS lowa, $567,000,000; of Michigan, $500,000,000: of Ohio, $1,431,000,000. At .6 per cent.. $200,000,000 would be required to pay the interest on these mortgages, as the total in the five States is $3,431,000,000. The grand total of mortgage indebtedness on farm property in only five States exceeds by $1,846,000,000 the entire national debt, principal and interest, as reported at the close of the fiscal year ending the 3th of last June. Statistics of the Agricultural Bureau of Illinois show a decrease in the value of farms an J farm property in the State during the past year of $4,000,000. Governor Campbell, who is a farmer, says the depreciation of the same kind of property in Ohio, in the past ten years aggregates $80,000,000. Hugh McCulloch, the great Republican financier, who was Secretary of the Treasury under two administrations, declares that while rents in cities and large towns are steadily increasing, agriculture has become so depressed that good farms offer no inducements to tenants to hire them at a rental of 6 per cent, on one-third of their assessed value. In the face of facts like these there are still some Republicans left in the country who vainly try to make the farmer believe that he is in a prosperous condition. They fight against the evident fact that our system of tariff taxation bears with undue weight upon the farming class. In order to escape the acknowledgment of that fact some deny that there is any agricultural depression. A Republican orator has even claimed that farm mortgages, instead of being evidences of distress, are to be taken as p.xiofs that the farmers are prosperous and happy. But when a man feels pain he does not need a doctor to convince him that nothing hurts him. The pain makes itself felt and can be seen in the agonized expression of the features. No theories of any kind and no so-called proof can remove it for a moment from the consciousness of the sufferer. The best evidence that the farmers are less prosperous than they were is to be found, not in figures of farm mortgages, but in the fact that this lack of prosperity is universally recognized by the farmers themselves. In nearly every corner of the country there is a singular and pain-* lul unanimity on that point. While the causes of this depression are several, there can be little doubt that the main cause is to be found in the protective tariff system. Nothing can be clearer than the fact that the duties on farm products have, in almost every case, no effect whatever in raising the ! trices of those products, since we are arge exporters of nearly every form of farm produce, and our imports from Canada and other countries are so insignificant as to have no effect whatever in reducing prices with us. It is equally clear that the boasted advantage to the farmer of protection’s home market is more fanciful than real; for this same home market pays not one cent more for farm produce than the “worn-out and effete nations of Europe” pay, and the farmer seldom even knows whether he is selling for consumption in the home market or in foreign markets. But protection to manufacturers and miners costs this country an enormous sum every year. Who foots protection’s bills? Who but the consumer? But the farmers constitute the largest class of consumers in the land; and when we say that protection is a burden upon the consumer, it is the same thing as to say that the farmers bear the greater part of this burden. Moreover, the burden which protection lays upon the great masses of the people who are neither farmers nor manufacturers and mine owners is itself largely shifted to the farmers and laboring people. The burden which protection lays upon the physician for medicine and for implements of surgery is shifted back upon his patients. In this way the rate of ultimate profit to the non-protected classes, who are not able to shift their back upon others, is largely reduced in directly by protection, and the former does not know what struck him. Let not the farmer be deceived bj the insincere rubbish about protection causing home competition to bring down prices of manufactured articles. The bull-dog tenacity with which the protected manufacturers fight for their duties, and flock to Washington at great expenditure of time and money to get them, is a suflficent answer to such nonsense. Our blessed tariff is levied on what a man spends, and the farmer spends all he makes. The tariff, therefore, lays a much greater burden proportionately upon him than upon the prosperous citizen who lays by half of what he makes. Again, the farmer does not buy much of those things which are not affected in price by the tariff. Very few buy wheat, flour, corn, pork, or beef. They all buy clothing, machinery, and tools, crockery, furniture, and a hundred forms of manufactured articles. The farmer needs only to investigate prices in the markets of the world to discover what the tariff is doing to promote agricultural depression.