The crowning cause of immediate discontent was the financial policy pursued by President Cleveland,[39] which stirred the wrath of the agrarians already agitated over inflation, and gave definiteness to an issue on which both parties had been judiciously ambiguous in their platforms in 1892. The farmers pointed out that, notwithstanding the increased output of corn, the total amount of money received in return was millions less than it had been in the early eighties. They emphasized the fact that more than half of the taxable acreage of Kansas and Nebraska was mortgaged, and that many other western states were nearly as badly off. The falling prices and their inability to meet their indebtedness they attributed to the demonetization of silver and the steady enhancement of gold.
For the disease, as they diagnosed it, they had a remedy. The government, they said, had been generous to Wall Street and financial interests at large by selling bonds at rates which made great fortunes for the narrow group of purchasers, and by distributing its deposits among the banks in need of assistance. The power of the government could also be used for the benefit of another class—namely, themselves. Gold should be brought down and the currency extended by the free coinage of silver on a basis of sixteen to one. The value of crops, when measured in money, would thus mount upwards, and it would be easier to pay the interest on mortgages and discharge their indebtedness. Furthermore, while the government was in the business of accommodating the public it might loan money to the farmers at a low rate of interest.[40] But the inflation of the currency and the increase of prices of farm products by the free coinage of silver were the leading demands of the discontented agrarians—an old remedy for an old disease.
FOOTNOTES:
[34] See below, p. 296.
[35] See above, p. 121.
[36] See above, pp. 67 ff.
[37] They polled about a million votes in the congressional elections of 1878.
[38] See above, p. 137.
[39] See above, p. 106.
[40] It is interesting to note that agricultural credit—a subject in which European countries are far advanced—is just now beginning to receive some attention in quarters where the demands of the farmers for better terms on borrowed money were once denounced as mere vagaries.