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Rh in the deflation that inevitably overtook the farmers and other people, and will in the end enforce itself upon all labor, willy-nilly.

When the farmer ships a carload of hogs to Chicago and finds that the produce of his hard work, which knows no eight-hour day, has vanished into nothingness, it is not the railway companies and the packing companies that have appropriated it, but it is the railway men and every other class of laboring man who has participated in the transportation, manufacturing and distribution of the food products, right down the line to the ultimate consumer.

Similarly, when the farmer buys his clothing at 1.7 times the pre-war price, probably for shoddy goods at that—and when the New England scrubwoman has to pay at the rate of $20 per ton for half a ton of anthracite—it is not the woolen manufacturer nor the anthracite coal-mining company that extort the price, but it is the miners and mill men, and again the railway men, the carters and all others who have to do with the handling of the goods.

For this situation also there is no political panacea. The thoughts of the Western farmers turning erroneously to money jugglery dwell moreover upon new governmental activities, such as more regulation and even renewed operation of the railways. Those would be the worst things that could happen, as Mr. McAdoo showed us thoroughly.

The aristocrats of labor, having come into possession of an undue part of the produce of the farmers and other people, buy profusely of automobiles and exercise a great deal of choice about their work, refusing to do anything but what is agreeable and being able to have