If Not Silver, What?

by John W. Bookwalter

How much of it? The records of the Patent Office show, and the experience of farmers confirms it, that all the improvements in farm machinery since 1870 have not reduced the labor cost of farm produce on the general average more than 2½ per cent. Here is a little paradox for you to study. In the twenty-five years from 1845 to 1870 the progress of invention in farm machinery was greater than in all the previous history of the world, marvellously rapid, in fact, and during those years the farm price of the produce steadily increased; but in the ensuing twenty-five years to 1895 there were very few improvements, and the price has declined with steadily increasing speed. This fact is either ignorantly or skilfully evaded by Edward Atkinson and David A. Wells in their elaborate articles on the subject; so I will present some facts and figures which were obtained early this year in the Patent Office, and carefully verified by members of Congress from every portion of the farming regions.

Since 1795 there have been granted 6,700 patents for plows, but since 1870 there have been but three really valuable improvements. Farmers are divided in opinion as to whether the riding plow reduces the labor cost. The lister, recently patented, throws the earth into a ridge and enables the farmer to plant without previously breaking the soil. It is valuable in the dry regions of the West, but useless where the rainfall is great, as the soil must there be broken up anyhow. There have been 920 corn gatherers patented, of which only one is considered a success, and most farmers reject it on account of the waste. The general verdict is that the labor of producing corn has been reduced very little, if any. In the labor of producing potatoes there has been no reduction whatever, nor in the finer garden products, nor in fruits. It takes the same labor to produce a fat hog or a fat ox, a sheep, horse, or mule, as in 1870. In wool growing many patents have been taken out for shearers, and three of them are said to be savers of labor, provided the wool grower is so situated that he can attach the shearer to a horse or steam power.

There have been since the opening of the Office 6,620 patents for harvesters, of which the only great improvement since 1870 is the twine binder, for which over 900 patents have been taken out. The beheader is used in California, as it was before 1870, and in the prairie regions the sheaf-carrier has recently been introduced, holding the sheaves until enough are collected to make a shock. Counting the labor of the men who did the binding after the original McCormick reaper at $2 per day, the total saving by all these improvements since 1870 is estimated at 6 cents per bushel for wheat, rye, and oats. Much of this saving in labor is neutralized by cost of machines, interest, and repairs. There have been nearly 3,000 patents in fences, over 5,000 in the making of boots and shoes, and in stoves and heaters 8,240, none affecting farm labor except the first. In cotton growing exactly the same processes are used, from planting to picking, as in 1850; but out of many hundred attempts to invent a cotton picker it is now claimed that one is a success, though it has not yet got into use. The cost of ginning the cotton has been reduced about two-fifths of a cent per pound. There have been 176 patents for saw gins, 63 for roller gins, and 47 for feeders to gins, out of all of which there has been a new gin evolved which will be in use hereafter. I might thus go around the list, but enough has been said to show that nearly all our farm machinery was in use before 1870, and that since that date, as I said, the reduction of labor cost has not upon the whole field exceeded 2½ per cent. The assertion that reduced transportation lowers the farm price is in flat contradiction of political economy, as, according to that, the benefits should be divided between producer and consumer, the farm price rising and the city or export price declining.

The price of what the farmer has to buy has declined in equal if not greater ratio, and so his margin is as great as ever.

It is evident that you are not a practical farmer. However, your non-acquaintance with the figures is not to be wondered at when we consider what has been said by great scholars and statesmen. I recently heard a politician, and one of perfectly Himalayan greatness, say in debate that a day’s work on an Illinois farm would now produce more than twice as much as in 1870, and another clinched it by adding that a man could pay for a good farm by his surplus from five years’ crops. Now go to some practical farmer and get him to make the calculation, and you will find that what he has saved by reduced prices is less than one-fifth of what he has lost from the same cause. The average farm family in the central West consists of five persons, and their greatest saving has been on clothing. You may set that at $30 per year. The next is in sugar, for which they pay but half the price of 1873. There is no other item that will reach $5, not even including all the iron or steel they have to buy in a year. The largest estimate of gains, unless they go into luxuries, does not exceed $90 per year. At least a third of this gain is offset by increased taxes.

Now let us see what this farm family has lost, counting only the price of the surplus it sells and taking our average from the official reports. On 500 bushels of wheat, at least $250; on 600 bushels of corn, $120; on ten tons of hay, $30; on rye, oats, potatoes, and so forth, $50; on three horses and mules sold per year, $100. Total, $550, being more than ten times the net gain over taxes.

The Agricultural Department figures indicate that, taking the United States as a whole, including even the intensive farming near the cities, the reduction of annual income is a few cents over $6 per acre. Thus something like $1,800,000,000 has been taken from the farmers’ annual income, and the farmer being just like any other man, in that he cannot spend money that he does not get, this withdraws $1,800,000,000 from the manufacturers’ and general market. In view of these figures—and if anything I have understated them—what conceivable good would a raise in the tariff do the manufacturers so long as our farmers must sell on a gold basis and be subject at the same time to the rapidly increasing competition of silver basis countries? I have said nothing of fixed charges which do not decline, or of the cost of the federal government, which steadily and rapidly increases. Have you heard of any decline in official salaries, taxes, debts, bonds, or mortgages?

That is plausible at first view, but it cannot be true as to the country generally, because wages have risen; or at least they had risen continuously till 1892, as is clearly shown in the Aldrich Report.

The Aldrich Report is a miserable fraud. It does not so much as mention farmers and planters or any of the laboring classes immediately dependent on farmers. It gives only the wages of the highest class of skilled laborers and in those trades only where the men are organized in ironbound trades unions which force up the wages of their members. Take the lists and census and add the numbers employed in every trade mentioned in that report, and you will find that all together they only amount to one fourth the number of farmers, or about 12 per cent. of the labor of the country. Furthermore, it takes no account whatever of the immense percentage of men in each trade who are out of employment. One who didn’t know better would conclude from it that our coal miners worked 300 days in the year, and that stone masons, plasterers, and the like worked all the year in the latitude of New York and Chicago. And these are but a few of the tricks and absurdities of the report.

Wages are labor’s share of its own product. The claim that wages generally can rise on a declining market involves a flat contradiction of arithmetic; it assumes that the separate factors can increase while the sum total is decreasing, and that the operator can pay more while he is every day getting less. The whole philosophy of the subject was admirably summed up by a Southern negro with whom I recently talked. “If wages be up, how come ’em up? We all’s gittin’ but half what we useter git for our cotton, and how kin five cents a pound pay me like ten cents a pound, and me a pickin’ out no mo’ cotton?” His philosophy applies to 60 per cent. of all the working people in the United States, for that proportion do not work for money wages. They produce, and what they sell the product for is their wages. Viewed in this, the only true light, the wages of 60 per cent. of our laborers have declined nearly one half, making the average decline for all laborers nearly a third. How, indeed, could it be otherwise? Will any sensible man believe that a farmer could pay men as much to produce wheat at $.50 as at $1.50? Or take the case of the cotton grower. It takes a talented negro to make and save 3,000 pounds of lint cotton; when he sold it at $.10 he got $300, and when he sells it at $.05 he gets $150, and all the tricks of all the goldbugs in the world cannot make it otherwise. To tell such men that their wages have increased, in the face of what they know to be the facts, is arrogant and insulting nonsense.