The tribune. [volume] (Beaufort, S.C.) 1874-1876, 1875-04-21
FRAUDS AND FARMERS.
\ Hint for The Changers to Work Upon--
Swindles In the Air.

~ Hint Tor The Changers to Work Upon--
Swindles In the Air.
An easy but enviable immortality
awaits that grange or farmers union
which will successfully divert the agri-
cultural attention from the mighty mis-
cries of railroad monopoly to the petty
frauds which infest our farmers lives
like vermin in a beggar's gaberdine.
The farmer is more exposed to petty
swlndling and Is more swindled in petty
ways than any other class in our commu-
mites. This proceeds partly from his
isolation and the unsophisticatedne in
separable from that condition; but it is
partly due also to an impatience of slow
returns and believe in shortcuts to
wealth. Commonly the farmer takes
only one paper, weekly; often he takes
none. In the former case he religiously
reads every line, advertisements and all.
New seeds that yield impossibly, new
breeds of stock and fowls, new varieties
of fruit, miraculous potatoes, oats which
stand like bean poles and quiver with
golden harvests, corn which produces
fifty ears to the stalk-he hears of all
these wealth bringing prodigies, he sees
them certified to in the most authentic
way, he believes in them implicitly and
invests in them extravagantly.
If the farmer takes no paper ut all,
and conducts his affairs entirely by the
unaided force of natural talent, him the
"agent" spies out, lies in wait for,
pounces upon, and grows fat by despoil-
ing. Say the agent is afruit peddler: he
exhibits his magnificsntly colored litho-
graphs of impossible peaches, apples
and pears, or goes around with carpet
bags filed with samples of hypertrophied
California fruit preserved in spirits to
point his moral and adorn his tale. The
farmer buys strawberryplants by sample
and finds he has secured fine growing
crop of clover roots. We have known
an agent, says the New York World, to
make clever living by going round the
country selling plants of that pretty
solanaceous herb, the PhysaHs Alke-
kengi, as a new and valuable variety of
winter-ripening cherry.
Even if the farmer escapes being vic
timized by the agent and the advertise
ment, he is still liable to be caught by
the insidious wiles of the local Congress-
man and the deceitful seed packages of
the Agricultural bureau. One cannot
always be upon the Q,i viue, and imagine
the anguishes which await the farmer
who, going away from home upon bust
ness, finds on returning that his son has
doctored the sheep or the COWS accord
ing to recipes found in the agricultural
report, and his wife has sowed her
flower beds with seeds from Commits
sioner Watts
1t occurs to us that the oranges have
here a wide field for the exercise of q
very signal usefulness. Here are abuses
which they can successfully attack, and
which the whole country will thank them
for abating. If they will ferret out these
fraudulent agents and swindling adver-
tisement and expose them upon all oc-
casions, they will remit q good many
sturdy knaves to honest industry while
saving the farmers an annual sum of
money absolutely lost, the aggregate of
which would suffice to endow half q
dozen colleges upon the most hberui
scale.
If in addition to hunting down indi-
vidual swindles the oranges should make
determined war upon the ignorance
which renders such swindling prosper
GUS, they will be doing a work of nation.
al education quite out of the reach of
school boards and college corporations.
1t is probable that there is nothing which
the collective American people need so
urgently to learn as the simple fact that,
two and two making four, two and two
cannot make five at any time, in any
place, nor under any conceivable circum-
stances. The collective people can only
learn this by each person realizing it for
himself individually. Ignorance of this
principle underlies pretty much all mis-
takes, financial, political, moral, as well
as agricultural.