“Speaking of the newspaper business,” he said, of which we were not speaking at all, “I make considerable money advising the farmers to patronize the ‘Rural Home,’ than which, in my opinion, a greater literary thug never existed, but unfortunately for an oppressed people, the publisher of the ‘Home’ (his name is Litch; it should be Leech) pays liberal commissions, and I must live. I have a copy in my pocket; you may examine it when there is positively nothing else to do.”
He handed it to me, and although it was folded, I saw on the first page a picture of an animal so admirably proportioned that but little was wasted in legs, being solid meat with the exception of a small head and four pins to hold it up. By examining the note at the bottom, I found it was a pig, although I should not have suspected it in the absence of the statement, and that pairs of the breed could be had by addressing the publisher, and enclosing money order or draft for fifty dollars.
“If you should do yourself the injustice at some time in the future to look it over,” Mr. Biggs continued, indicating that I was not to look at it then, but to listen, “you would find it filled with all sorts of ingenious appeals for the farmer’s money, and that the editor claims to be poor, but honest, and oppressed by monopolies, like the rest of them. But what are the hard, uncomfortable facts?”
I looked at him as if to say that I did not know what the facts were, but had no doubt they were bad enough.
“The facts are that while the agricultural population is cooped up in hot school-houses drinking spring water, and attending Alliance meetings, the publisher of the ‘Rural’ is holding ice in his mouth at an elegant club, only changing this delightful occupation to gulp down expensive champagne. He lives in a villa, does this agricultural fraud of the name of Litch, and makes a fortune every year; and, although he earnestly advises the farmers’ wives and daughters to spend their spare time in churning the butter and gathering the eggs, to buy good books to improve themselves (P. S.—For which he is agent), he sends his own wife and daughters to spend their spare time in summer at cool places, where they may swim in the sea. That’s the kind of an oppressed citizen of a groaning government Litch is, and I happen to know that he is the friend of the monopolists he denounces, and that he is in their pay; that he is the tool of the thieves who manufacture worthless machinery for farmers; of the confidence men who advertise eggs, pigs and calves at a high price, and that he is the worst enemy of the farmers generally.”
I pretended to be very much surprised at this, though I was not.
“If you should be caught in a lonely place on a rainy day, with no other paper in your pocket than that, you would find a column of inquiries with reference to agricultural matters addressed to the editor (who is supposed to be informed, but who really gets all his information from the agricultural departments of the metropolitan papers), each one of which closes with a good word for ‘your noble,’ or ‘your brave,’ or ‘your widely circulated’ paper. The scoundrel writes them himself! And there is another column from ‘Aunt Sue.’ He is also ‘Aunt Sue.’ In short, he is everything except an honest man.”
Although I said nothing, I remembered that every farmer who moved to Twin Mounds found out the agricultural papers, and denounced them; in short, that everybody except the farmers knew what dreadful frauds they were.
“If I should talk as candidly and honestly to my friends of the plough as I talk to my friends of the pen,” Mr. Biggs continued, “I should advise them to take the papers which other people take; the papers which censure the farmer when he deserves it, instead of pandering to his ignorance, and forever rubbing him on the back as an honest but oppressed fellow, through no fault of his own. You cannot possibly do a man more harm than to assure him that whatever he does is right, and that whatever his enemy does is wrong, but this is what Litch does, and he is well paid for doing it. The farmer follows the furrow because he can make more at that than at anything else; he is no more oppressed than other men, except as his ignorance makes it possible, for there never was an age when it was not profitable to be sensible (the world being full of unscrupulous men), therefore the pretence that a man cannot be honest except he plough or sow for a living is not warranted by the facts. Getting up very early in the morning, and going about agricultural work all day in rough clothes, does not particularly tend to clear the conscience, but because politicians who occasionally have use for them have said these things, the farmers go on accepting them, stubbornly refusing to be undeceived, because it is unpleasant to acknowledge ignorance after you have once thought yourself very cunning. In my time, I have harangued a meeting of well-to-do farmers over the wrongs they were suffering at the hands of miserable tradesmen,—they call them middle-men,—who did not know one day whether they would be able to open their doors the next, and received earnest applause, after which I got ten dollars for a charter for an Alliance (which cost me at the rate of two dollars a thousand) without difficulty. It would not be a greater confidence game were I to borrow ten dollars of them to pay express charges on the body of a dead brother, giving as security a bogus bond, for the time a farmer spends attending Alliance meetings should be spent at home in reading an honest work entitled, ‘Thieves Exposed,’ or ‘The Numerous Devices Men Invent to Live without Work,’ but they rather enjoy my lectures on the beauties of combination for protection, and the cheapness of Alliance charters, for I never fail to relate how honest, how industrious, how intelligent, and how oppressed they are. If they want to pay big prices for such comforts, it is their misfortune; I must live, and if you say that I am a fraud, I reply that all men are frauds. The lawyers never go to law; the doctors never take medicine; the preachers seldom believe in religion, and I never farm. The different trades and professions are only respectable because little is known of them except by those interested in their profits, and I am no worse than the rest of them. Whoever will pay for being humbugged will find humbugs enough, and the only difference between me and other professional men is that I acknowledge that I am dishonest. My position on the reform question is briefly this (and I may add that it is the position of every man): I am against monopolies until I become a monopolist myself. I am at present engaged in the reform business that I may become a monopolist. If I should suddenly become rich, what would I do? This: Refer to Alliances as dangerous, and such demagogues as myself as suspicious loafers.”
Mr. Biggs seemed to greatly enjoy this denunciation of himself, and ripped out an oath or two expressive of contempt for his victims.