Page:Oscar Ameringer - Socialism for the Farmer (1912).djvu/12

 joint in Packingtown just to make both ends "meat?"

Did you ever haul a ton of sugar beets to the refinery and your wife hauled the sugar she bought with the six dollars you received for the ton of 15 per cent beets home under the buggy seat?

Did you ever sell a barrel of apples for one dollar and then throw a double decked fit when the "news butch" on the "Cannon Ball" soaks you a nickel apiece?

Did you ever sell a heifer, horn, hoof, hide and tallow and all and then buy back the tanned hide for more money than you got fer the whole beast?

Most likely you did and blamed it on the tariff, or the gold standard or those pesky "Labor union fellers" in town who do nothing but strike for more wages and who make the price of every blamed thing go clear out of sight.

But you're wrong. It's not the tariff or the gold standard or the Labor Unions that cause the trouble. It's the capitalist system. It's the man on the bridge between you and the city laborer.

That fellow pays you for a basket of grapes two cents, while the worker in town is soaked 40 cents for the same. That's an increase of 2000 per cent. Now you understand why that City worker howls for more wages.

The buyers pay 35 cents for potatoes in Waupacca, Wis., and the people of Milwaukee, only a hundred miles away, pay $1.50. This is an increase of 300 per cent of which only about 30 per cent went to freight and handling.

The farmer feeds the calf until it has grown into a cow. Then he feeds the cow, milks the cow, hauls the milk to the station and pays the freight to the city. For all this he gets four cents a quart. While the milk company for delivering the milk from the depot to the consumer gets an equal amount.

Asparagus; price paid to the farmer 8c; cost in the city 35c; an increase of 400 per cent.

Tomatoes $2.00 for a 24 pound crate or 8c per pound; cost in the city 25c per pound; advance 300 per cent. Wheat, for which the farmer received one dollar per bushel, when converted into breakfast cereal, sells for 15 cents per pound or $9.00 per bushel, and the steer for which the farmer received $55.00 on the hoof, figured on the basis of prices paid in swell restaurants, runs up to about $2000. That is, the city man pays as much for the steer as the farm on which he was raised is mortgaged for.