The Bottineau pioneer. (Bottineau, N.D.) 1885-1895, 1888-07-26

Introductory remarks by George
Niche, president of the County ALI
ance:
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: 1t would be imper-
tinent for me to waste valuable time in offer
ing an introduction to any of the gentlemen
who are to address you on this occasion. A
mere mention of their m is q sufi cient
guarantee that an intellectual feast awaits
you which has never been equaled in the
history of our county. 1t is highly impor
tant, yes, absolutely necessary that we as
farmers, should often meet on occasions like
this to rub shoulders, compare notes and
report progress of our success in the great
struggle We are engaged, in repelling cor
porate thieves, unlawful trusts and unprin-
cipled u~surists who are eating up our sub
~sistence, despoiling our homes and over
towering our people.
Settled rs we are in Dakota whose virgin
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earth, it ought to be an easy matter to place
ourselves and families in comfortable cir
cumstances if we had a free market for our
produce even if we have to compete with
the pauper labor Of our unfortunate breth-
rem, Of every country that duplicates our
productions, from the minute our wheat
leaves granaries until it is converted into
bread to feed the consumer. Organized
Trusts and leeches of trade who have turned
the honorable commerce and exchange mar
ket of our land into dens of pollution and
robbery, hover over it as a pack of wolves
over the slain IN the field of carnage, claim
ing it as their lawful prey and stick to every
dollar over and above what barely keeps
our souls and bodies together. Legitimate
profits never did not and never will satisfy
their greed so long as we allow them to
exist.
While tariffs, trusts and legions of COM
binations enchance the value of every
thing we have to purchase to about three
times its true value in the worlds markets,
till between them we may call them the
upper and the neither mill stones, we ar e
ground to pieces, wearing out our bodies
and impoverishing our lands with no profit
to ourselves nor to the community we live
in, as our earning 60 to swell the pn1ses of
the city millionaires, who give US nothing
but taunts and sneers in return, but over
the mountain tops Of time I can see the
dawn Of q better day for the Da-
kota farmer slowly but surely he is realiz-
ing the fact that neither God, nor nature, nor
the constitution of this great country ever
intended that we should be hewers of wood
and drawers Of water with our eyes put
out that we could not read the inscription on
our collar of serfdom placed on our necks,
by the moneyed aristocracy of our country.
Slowly but surely we are laying the founda.
ton Of a structure that will
increase in proportion with time,
until we can purchase our wants
in the worlds markets from the cheapest
seller and carry our No. l hard, pure and
unadulterated to the European markets
where we can sell to the millers without
being robbed by the middlemen
All through that agency, the Territorial
Alliance in a little more than twelve months
we have demonstrated the fact that we can
buy our machinery at a great reduction or
former prices. We have handled one hun
dred car loads of binder Irvine bought direct
from the manufacturers at reduced prices.
Last year we proved to the world that
hail assurances had been robbing us by one
half, as at a cost of twenty cents per acre to
the insured, we paid every loss in full that
was sustained by every member Of our
company in Dakota.
While we are prepared to, and are insur-
ing farm buildings at a half less than any
other company and making money; this is
only an instance of what we can and will
do in the future. 1t is the duty Of every
farmer in the territory to become a member
of this institution, and he is neither doing
his duty to his family, to his neighbours, or
himself if he does not.
A few weeks ago a number of usurers,
who, to conceal their true business, call
themselves bankers denounced US soundly
for daring to demand a law from the
next legislature that would prevent them,
taking all the property a farmer owned to
pay back any small sum he might be obliged
to BORROW from them in his extremity.
These gentry declared US to be anarchs and
socialists and revolutionists, and demanded
that we be dealt with as such.
We this day hurl back the libelous Sian
der in their teeth;our mission here is not to
destroy property, but to make il Ind to pro-
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