The farmer has benefited quite as much as the manufacturer, the merchant, and the wage-worker. The most welcome and impressive fact established by the last census is the wide and even distribution of wealth among all classes of our countrymen. The chief agencies in producing this distribution are shown by the census to be the development of manufactures, and the application of new inventions to universal use. The result has been an increasing interdependence of agriculture and manufactures. Agriculture is now, as it always has been, the basis of civilization. The six million farms of the United States, operated by men who, as a class, are steadfast, single-minded, and industrious, form the basis of all the other achievements of the American people and are more fruitful than all their other resources. The men on those six million farms receive from the protective tariff what they most need, and that is the best of all possible markets. All other classes depend upon the farmer, but the farmer in turn depends upon the market they furnish him for his produce. The annual output of our agricultural products is nearly four billions of dollars. Their increase in value has been prodigious, although agriculture has languished in most other countries; and the main factor in this increase is the corresponding increase of our manufacturing industries. American farmers have prospered because the growth of their market has kept pace with the growth of their farms. The additional market continually furnished for agricultural products by domestic manufacturers has been far in excess of the outlet to other lands. An export trade in farm products is necessary to dispose of our surplus; and the export trade of our farmers, both in animal products and in plant products, has very largely increased. Without the enlarged home market to keep this surplus down, we should have to reduce production or else feed the world at less than the cost of production. In the forty years ending in 1900 the total value of farm property increased twelve and a half billions of dollars; the farmer gaining even more during this period than the manufacturer. Long ago overproduction would have checked the marvelous development of our national agriculture, but for the steadily increasing demand of American manufacturers for farm products required as raw materials for steadily expanding industries. The farmer has become dependent upon the manufacturer to utilize that portion of his produce which does not go directly to food supply. In 1900 fifty-two per cent, or a little over half, of the total value of the farm products of the Nation was consumed in manufacturing industries as the raw materials of the factories. Evidently the manufacturer is the farmer’s best and most direct customer. Moreover, the American manufacturer purchases his farm supplies almost exclusively in his own country. Nine-tenths of all the raw materials of every kind and description consumed in