Of course, such conditions do not obtain with all products. In some of the great staples, as wheat, the cost of transportation and commissions is often reduced by competition and scientific handling to probably its lowest terms. But that there are abuses and extortions, and remediable conditions, in the middleman system—by which I mean collectively all traders between producer and consumer—no one will attempt to deny. The farmer cannot rise to his proper place until the stones are taken off his back.
The abuses must be checked and discriminations removed, whether in the middleman trade itself, rates of express companies and other carriers, or stock-market gambling. The middleman system has had a free field to play in, the wealth of the country to handle; it has exercised its license, and in too many cases it has become parasitic, either protected by law and custom or unreachable by law or custom. It is a shame that our economic machinery is not capable of handling the situation.
Relation of the question to cost-of-living.
It is customary just now to attribute the high cost of living to lessened production due to a supposed decline of agriculture, and to advise, therefore, that more persons engage in farming for the purpose of increasing the product. This position is met by an editorial of the New York Tribune, which holds that intermediary trading combinations are responsible:
"It is true that the raising of cattle for the market has almost ceased in the East and that agriculture generally has not kept pace with the demand for food products. Yet it is hard to believe that agriculture in any part of the Union would steadily decline in the face of an enormous appreciation of the cost to the consumer of all farm products, were there not some powerful disturbing factor operating to deny the farmer the benefits of that appreciation. If the Eastern farmer could have reaped a legitimate share of the increase in the price of farm produce which has taken place in the last twenty years, he would certainly be in position to command all the labor he needs and to develop resources now neglected because it does not pay to develop them. Under normal conditions economic law would certainly drive labor and energy into a field of production in which there had been the greatest relative expansion in the selling price of products.
"Yet economic law has not operated to stimulate agriculture, because the returns from steadily mounting prices have not really reached the producer. Thirty years ago the fattening of steers for the local markets was common in the East. But when the vast Western ranges were opened, and the great packing houses were established, the cheapness of range beef, refrigerated and delivered in Eastern cities, was used as a weapon to kill off the cattle industry of the East. When the Eastern cattleman was driven out of business, the price of beef rose, but virtually all the increase has gone to the packing combinations, which fix their own price to the Western range man and their own price to the consumer and artificially control the supply so as to discourage increased production in the West and to prevent a revival of production in the East. The country is growing in population at the rate of twenty to twenty-five per cent each decade. But Secretary Wilson has shown that the supply of food animals is not being maintained in proportion to population. In the last decade cattle have remained about stationary in numbers, swine are actually decreasing, and, while more sheep are available, the supply has diminished relatively to population.
"It can hardly be contended that with steadily diminishing supplies and steadily increasing prices the law of supply and demand would not work out a new balance, stimulating production through easy profits, were there no artificial interception of the producer's normal share of the advance in price. Were there a free market for the Eastern raiser of stock, milk, and food products generally, with the middleman's commissions properly restricted, Eastern farming would probably be profitable enough to hold its own against manufacturing and to compete successfully with the manufacturer for labor."
The farmer's part.
Of course, it is necessary to teach every farmer how to grow more crops, for this is his business, and it also enlarges his personal ambition and extends his power and responsibility; but merely to grow the crops will not avail,—this is only the beginning of the problem: the products must be distributed and marketed in such a way that the one who expends the effort to produce them shall receive enough of the return to identify him with the effort. Thereafter, social and moral results will follow.