Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/44

34 is upheld by the tariff barons and beneficiaries—a comparatively few very wealthy corporations, each one "log-rolling" with the other for mutual benefits. By their employment of large bodies of workmen, and their power to contribute money and to bulldoze morally through the "pay-envelope," congressional districts, States, and the nation are in their clutch.

Of course, the farmer vote is great enough to have its way, but it can not apply itself with the force and ease of a well-regulated machine, as its almost feudal masters can theirs. Our farmers lack also, as I have already said, the clear perception that they and their interests are exploited. The system which robs them, under cover of law, large numbers of them still believe is for their own benefit.

It is a matter for amazement, though, that some leaders among them do not, at least, plead through their granges and societies, for direct protection, since they are so sure the complex taxation of themselves tends to their prosperity, by some indirect hocus pocus which nobody can explain. If protection is good for agriculture, it would certainly help it more to put it in the line of direct benefit, and let other industries, so long pampered, have for a change the indirect blessings of the tariff for a term of years.

As the farmers are by far the most numerous single part of our population, and represent well toward one third of the people in numbers, why not give to them directly, lavish bounties from the national treasury? Let an act, for instance, be passed to give them from fifty to one hundred and fifty per cent more for all they raise than they now receive. This would somewhere near double their income. "With this great enlargement of their means they could pay more for labor, and they could buy two or three times as large a quantity of manufactured goods. Of course, "could" invariably means "would" in the protectionist's dictionary; and so we should see a tremendous impetus given to all other industries, and to manufactures particularly, by the very greatly increased purchases of the farmers and their doubly paid help. As it has been for two or more generations, "the few" have been protected on purpose to help "the many" by the tremendous overflow which the benevolence of "the few" precipitates. But just think how much more overflow would be sure to run from "the many" to "the few" than is possible in the other direction!

Could there be any finer or fairer scheme than this? Having lived in the moonlight of protection so long, is it not the farmer's turn now to have its sunlight? And, inasmuch as the manufacturers and protected interests say that this moonlight, or indirect incidence of their tax system, is a great good to the farmer, it will, of course, be of great good to the manufacturer. And there will be vastly more of it, since large bodies reflect immensely more to