legislation has been making the farmer's life harder for the farmer; it is because the non-producing classes have been producing the laws and making it more profitable to gamble in farm products than to produce them.

"The idea of laying the blame of the present condition at the farmer's door! The idea of suggesting as a remedy 1 the closing of schools in order that the people may not become dissatisfied! Why, my friends, there will be dissatisfaction so long as the cause for dissatisfaction exists. Instead of attempting to prevent people realizing their condition, why don't these critics try to improve the condition of the farmers of this country?"

The Appeal to Reason says:

"The demand for servant girls in the cities is greater than the supply, so the papers state. The farmers should send their daughters to the cities to wait on the drones. After raising the food of the world to feed the drones, the farmers should train their girls to cook for them! And make their clothes! and clean their houses! That is the system. The number of people who are getting a graft on production that enables them to charge a profit on the farmers and workers sufficient to enable them to live thus, increases rapidly, hence the scarcity of 'servant girls." 'Servants' is the same term applied to the black slaves. At a time when the girls and boys are needed at home to ease down the life of the father and mother who have. raised and loved and suffered for them, the industrial conditions are made so hard that they are forced to go out

'into service' for the fellows who have been charging the parents a profit on what they had to buy large enough to pay their sons and daughters a wage. In reality, the parents pay the wages by this profit, while the drones get the service. Only poverty compels the girls and boys to work for the drones. Poverty is necessary to have service and the drones see that poverty exists. Otherwise they would have to do their own work."

To recapitulate, then, it would first of all be out of the question for the mass of the people to think of fleeing to the country and taking up farming, when the great social and industrial troubles break upon society. And second, we may look for disturbances to break out amongst the farming population at any time. The landlord, the trust, competition, and, in fact, all of the evils of our present industrial system, have been at work and have changed the farmer-the once sturdy and conservative element of society-into a seething and discontented class, ready to resort to any and everything to change a system that works so many wrongs and hardships upon them. Such items as the following have opened the eyes of the farmer and set him to thinking.

A recent editorial in the San Francisco Examiner says: "Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt's huge British steam yacht Valiante has joined Mr. F. W. Vanderbilt's British steam yacht Conqueror in New York harbor. The Valiante cost $800,000. This represents the profits on a crop of about 15,000,000 bushels of sixty-cent wheat, or the entire prod

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uct of at least 8,000 160-acre farms. In other words, 8,000 farmers, representing 40,000 men, women and children, worked through sun and storm to enable Mr. Vanderbilt to have built in a foreign shipyard such a pleasure craft as no sovereign in Europe possesses. The construction of that vessel required the labor of at least 1,000 mechanics for a year. The money she cost, put in circulation among our workmen, would have had a perceptible influence upon the state of times in some quarters."

The present tendency of things indicates that the time will come before long when we will have a landlord and a landless population in the place of the farmers. But the probabilities are that before the culmination of such an unhappy condition of affairs, society will be in the throes of a deadly revolution. A revolution long in preparation, and slow to manifest itself, yet none the less terrible and far-reaching in its effects when once precipitated.

CHAPTER XVIII.

PLUTOCRACY.

Banks and the Money Power-What Scarcity of Money Means-How It is Manipulated By Wall Street and the Banks-A Villainous System That Enslaves the Industries and People of the Country -Speculators; Watered Stock; Methods of Finance.

The great revolution will be preceded and precipitated by a money panic. After a general survey of the field, the important bearing of money, the money power and banks becomes apparent. Also the expediency of reserving the discussion of these factors until now.

At the bottom of the whole financial system is a scarcity. of money. There is not nearly enough money to conduct the business of the country on. Money in a very limited quantity is what the money-lenders want, and is the chief characteristic of our present financial system. Were money plentiful their occupation would be gone. They see that it is kept scarce. It is estimated that the volume