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Show FARMERS FURNISH THE GOODS, BUT I SPECULATORS GET THE MONEY. One of the very funny war notions extant is that the farmers of the United States receive extraordinarily high prices for their products from tho European nations. One prominent daily recently stated with that pccullm' scrious-noSB scrious-noSB tllitf Pprlg" from Ignornncc that five out of every bI dollars' uphill In Amoricn for war supplied goes IhlO tho pockels of the Americon fnrmci'si FlgUrGs were, quoted showing that the moat ftntl dairy products sent to Europe in five months were five times the cost of arms and ammunition being supplied here. The truth, however, is that the farmers didn't get o cent of that money directly. Selling their stuff to local buyers nt prices fixed by boards of trade am! exchanges, the goods were shipped to market centers. Foreign buyers in this country never visited a single farm. Instead, they called at, the market centers, where farmers' products were held for speculation. The latter sold the goods to the foreign agents nt war prices and pocketed the huge profits. Farmers could have received the war prices direct If they possessed their own marketing system. Tho annual demand helped even the buyers' nnd board of trade prices to a certain extent, no doubt. Their profits as a rule were only slightly mor than usual. The speculators got the big prices. Every farmer knows thjs nnd mourns the fact. Some day they as a class arc going to be their own little speculators, and then there will be more prosperity spread over the map, Instead of it clinging to particular streets in particular cities. While the American farmer is turning out more crops than ever before, while the South is recovering from its troubles with King Cotton-in Cotton-in short, while the rural life of the nation is highly satisfactory except ns to the cotton embargo em-bargo and the problems surrounding this question, ques-tion, European farmers and planters arc putting the money that formerly was put into plows, binders nnd reapers into cannon. Worse still, hnrvests that would have been gathered by Ingenious In-genious machinery most of it American is now being gathered by women, old men, Uoys and prisoners of war. Implements of war have not yet been turned Into implements of agriculture. Hut wo will hope that even the bloody business over yonder will prove but the travail that leads to a birth of peace in which the sword will become be-come a plawsharuj |