The farmers, of all men, most need the aid of capital, and of all men they find it most difficult to secure such aid. For years before the accidental, or, rather, providential, discovery of an immense deposit of gold-bearing quartz in the Santa Catalina Mountains in Arizona enabled me to attempt alleviation of some of the evils under which the world suffers, I had observed that even when the manufacturing and commercial interests of the land were in a fairly prosperous condition, the farmers did not share in the general bounty, and I observed that usually the produce of the farmers’ land could only be sold at such low prices as left them, at the close of the season, a little more in debt, and much more discouraged. The official report of the Illinois State Board of Agriculture for 1889 exhibited the distressing fact that the corn crop of that State for that year actually sold for $10,000,000 less than it cost to produce it, and conditions since then have only slightly improved. Even as I write, there are thousands of families all over the land, not merely in a few localities where the crops have failed, but on the virgin prairies of Dakota, on the rich soil of the Mississippi bottoms, and in the fertile valleys of Virginia, who are in distress, not because they have been idle or dissolute, but because their last crops did not sell for enough to pay the cost of their production and transportation to market, including interest at six, eight, and ten per cent per annum on the value of the land. Low prices, according to all standard writers on political economy, are the direct results of a contracting currency, and a consequent increasing scarcity of money, and the cost of production is not only greatly increased by inability of the producer to obtain money except at high rates of interest, but the terms upon which money can be had at all are often so exacting as to discourage permanent improvement. The farmer will not cultivate except for immediate crops if he sees no hopeful outlook for the future, and not only fears but expects that the mortgage he has given will, in the end, cause his home to be transferred to a purchaser at sheriff’s sale. The yield of the Morning mine has already largely increased the volume of standard money all over the world, and this may do much toward removing some of the unfortunate conditions to which I have referred; but such yield may also have a tendency to discourage the loaning of money on long loans, for men who have means to invest may prefer to place them in property, the value of which must advance with the increase of the volume of money, rather than in loans, the value of which must remain stationary absolutely, and cannot but diminish relatively.