“To The Arena.
“Gentlemen: I enclose my subscription for The Arena for the current year. The only reason for my tardiness in doing this is pinching, grinding poverty. If we farmers do not assist the Old Arena, so loyal to our interests, we shall deserve the fate many of us have already accepted; that is, the doom of serfdom under the club of plutocracy.
“We, at our home, are straining every nerve and denying ourselves of almost the comforts of life for the purpose of meeting our mortgage that falls due on the first of July. Our farmers here in the West are divided into four classes:
“First. Those who have failed to meet even the interest on loans, who have been closed out, and are now renters, often, of the very farms which they once fondly hoped to make their own.
“Second. Those who are still paying interest or keeping the companies at bay in the courts until one more crop may ripen, but without any well-founded hope of saving their homes.
“Third. Those who are skimping, pinching, almost starving to pay their mortgages. I belong to this class. I still struggle with the incubus.
“Fourth. A very few who wisely have never encumbered their homes. I have given the classes in the order of their numerical importance.
“I live in the beautiful little West Twin Creek valley about seven miles in length. There are but two pieces of unencumbered property in the valley; one belonging to a poor widow, and the other to a bank president. Thirty-five per cent of the farms have already passed into the hands of mortgagees; many of the remainder have changed hands, shifted under renewals and various expedients to avoid the ruination of closing out. This is more than an average well-to-do community, selected from this or any other central county of Kansas. We are realizing to the full that ‘Beneficent Effect of Falling Prices’ which was so ably set forth (from his standpoint) by Dean Gordon in The Arena for March. If all people were out of debt, falling prices might not work so great injustice. But when a vast majority of the people are in debt, and heavily in debt, and when a man talks of the blessings that fall from falling prices, the conviction is forced upon us that the killer of fools in his annual round has missed one conspicuous example. The trouble is, our dollar of debt, instead of decreasing, has more than doubled in its power as compared with labor and the products of labor. Meanwhile our Solons talk glibly of ‘vested rights,’ ‘corporate rights,’ etc., strenuously objecting to squeezing the water out of their stocks, while they have by legislation for the last thirty-five years remorselessly squeezed the value out of our property.
“When our debts were contracted the values of everything were double what they now are. I could then have sold my farm for three thousand dollars; now, although it has been much improved, it would go a-begging at one thousand dollars. Perhaps there is not as much distress in our country as there was three or four years ago. People have adjusted themselves somewhat to their straitened circumstances, and a few are becoming actually reconciled to their condition! I heard one man who had recently failed in business as a grain-dealer say, ‘Well, Cleveland is right on this money question; we want a money good in Yurrup or any other part of the world.’ As I looked at the battered hat of this personage, at the split toes of his shoes, the ragged elbows of his coat, and the rents in his demoralized nether garments, I could but ejaculate, ‘May the Lord have mercy on your ignorant soul! what does it matter to you what kind of money they use in Europe?’
“We are now taking the advice of Governor Morrill, who says: ‘If you cannot get seventy-five cents a day, work for fifty cents.’ Our Republican speakers advise us to dress plainly, live the same, and work still harder. We are told to ‘stop running around to Alliances and picnics.’ We have taken this advice. We had to take it! But we have now reached the bottom. We can curtail our dress no further without making our garb identical with our complexion. We cannot further reduce our rations and live. We cannot extend the hours of labor, for most of us have already adopted the blessed eight-hour system; that is, we work eight hours before dinner and eight hours after dinner.