Barton County democrat. [volume] (Great Bend, Kan.) 1885-1915, 1888-08-02
RoeBINe THE FARMERS.
A Few Timely Thoughts About the Agri-
cultural West and the Trusts.

A Few Timely Thoughts About the Agri-
cultural West and the Trusts.
Last year over 80 per cent. of the
total exports from the United States
were farm products. They were all
sold at absolute free trade prices,
while on all the farm supplies. provis-
ions and clothing used by the farmer
in producing them a tax of from % to
IT'S per cent. average 45 per cent. }
was paid into an overlooking treasury.
Mr.. Harrison's organs quote from a
speech in the Senate in 1886, in which
he declared that ''our policy should be
small farms worked by the men who
own them" In spite of this emphatic
condemnation of the policy of class
government. Mr.. Harrison has accept
ed nomination on a platform adyo-
eating an increase of taxes to the point
of prohibitive embargo. He declared
in 1886 what our policy ought to be-
''small farms worked by the men who
own them.'' In 1888 the bride of a
Presidential nomination has led him to
repudiate this policy and to appear be-
fore the people as the representative of
the Depews, Thurstons and Haymonds
of the Robber Trusts of the East and
the Robber Rings of the West.
If the trust agents and syndicate at
torneys who assembled at Chicago and
called themselves Republican conyen-
ton could carry out their plans for
free whisky and higher taxes on the
necessaries of life, the ruin of the great
agricultural West would be completes
hot nod TO hkaf .alr
by embargo. What the canker worm
left the locust would destroy.
Already the condition of the agri-
cultural West is grevious. Its vitali-
ty is Slapped by the villainous system
of class robbery, which drains it of it's
resources to fatten favored class in a
favored locality-a class which does
not constitute one-tenth of one per
cent. of the total populations class
composed of men whose vast fortunes
already excite the establishment of the
world; who rival the spendthrifts of
the Roman Empire in display and ex-
travagance; who spend half the year
in Europe, scattering with lavish hands
what this Government has enabled
them to rob from the American people
during the other half;who drive -four
INLAND" over vast tracts of land from
which the cotter, the crofter and the
shepherd have been expelled, bear
ing in their arms their household
goods and their squalid children to
make room-think of ito make room
for deer parks for American million
aires-for deer parks for Americans
enriched by robbery at home that they
may become oppressors abroad.
There is no limit to the insolence,
the cupidity, the arrogance, the cruel
ty of this mammon aristocracy of ours,
but we can not follow the Carnegie
coach from which Mr.. Blaine looks
down upon the American ducal deer
park that was once the home of a
sturdy peasantry-a peasantry evicted
from the ancestral holdings of a thou
sand years to crafty the pride and
vanity of an American moneyking.
We have to do with evictions at home
which made these evictions abroad
possible. The ruin of our own farmer
cries out against the Carnegies. the
Blaines, the Thurstons, Depews, Harri-
sons and Haymonds, and the figures
which tell its progress are eloquent in
denunciation OF the robber policy of the
Chicago platform. Read this table
compiled for one of the leading banks
of Chicago, published in the National
ReUiew and republished in the Con-
gressiOnaL Record of May 8, 1888: