We may best determine this question by inquiring exactly how the prices are forced up by monopolies. There can be but one way. The laws of supply and demand hold good, and it is out of the power of the producer to greatly affect the demand. It is only the supply of which he has control. From the manufacturers' trust to the laborers' union, the only way in which prices can be controlled is through a reduction in the supply of goods made or men allowed to work; and if the price were to be arbitrarily raised, the result would be the same; there would be a surplus of goods, or some unemployed workmen. In order to raise the price of his products, then, the farmer must do one of two things, which will bring in the end the same result. He must send less of his products to market--lessen the supply--or refuse to sell any thing at less than the increased price which he desires. In either case, if he plants the same acreage and gets the same yield as before, he will have a part of his crop left on his hands. The query then comes, can it be possible for the farmers all over the country to form so perfect and well-disciplined an organization that every member shall diminish his remittances to market of grain, wool, meat, hay, or what not, enough to raise prices; or that he shall refrain from selling all these articles below a certain defined price? It must be plain to every intelligent person that it would be a practical impossibility to effect such a thing. It would be possible to bring only a small percentage of the farmers in an area 3,000 miles in length and 1,500 in width into a single organization; and it would be essential to the success of this, as of every other scheme, that no outside competition should be permitted to exist. It may be argued that the Knights of Labor succeeded to a degree in gathering into one organization a large proportion of the workingmen in all the various trades in the country; but their members were mostly in cities, many worked together in great factories, and as regards ease of combination, they were far more easily handled than the widely scattered farmers of the country could hope to be. Besides, the Knights of Labor organization appears to be too unwieldy and cumbrous to be long successful, and internal dissension seems to have already brought it near its end. It is plain that the farmers are powerless to effect a reduction of the competition among themselves. Nor is this condition at all likely to change. Farming is unlike other modern productive industries in that the cost of production does not decrease as it is conducted on a larger scale. The most profitable farms are, and perhaps will always be, the small ones, where the details of the tillage come directly under the eye of the owner.