That the producer does not secure his proportionate share of the selling price in many products is a matter of the commonest knowledge, and much study has been made of the question. If the question is put in another way, the consumer pays too great a margin, in great numbers of cases, over the cost of production. The following press item, coming to my hand as I write, is an example (given for what it is worth), although not extreme: "The government of New York, and not the government in Washington, is where the people of this city must look, if they expect to see reduction in living expenses. A bushel of beans, for which the producer in Florida receives $2.25, with the transportation 50 cents for the 800-mile haul, should not cost the New York consumer $6.40 a bushel. The producer receives 35 per cent of the final price, the transporter 8 per cent, and the dealers 57 per cent. This is not a fair division. The problem is not one of trusts, tariffs, and other Washington matters, but simply one of providing straight and cheap ways open from all gardens and farms to kitchens and tables." The poorer the country or the less forehanded the people, the harder is the pinch of the usurer and the trader, and all the machinery of trade is likely to be manipulated against the defenseless man who stands stolidly between the handles of the plow. Of course, such conditions do not obtain with all products. In some of the great staples, as wheat, the cost of transportation and commissions is often reduced by competition and scientific handling to probably its lowest terms. But that there are abuses and extortions, and remediable conditions, in the middleman system--by which I mean collectively all traders between producer and consumer--no one will attempt to deny. The farmer cannot rise to his proper place until the stones are taken off his back. The abuses must be checked and discriminations removed, whether in the middleman trade itself, rates of express companies and other carriers, or stock-market gambling. The middleman system has had a free field to play in, the wealth of the country to handle; it has exercised its license, and in too many cases it has become parasitic, either protected by law and custom or unreachable by law or custom. It is a shame that our economic machinery is not capable of handling the situation. _Relation of the question to cost-of-living._ It is customary just now to attribute the high cost of living to lessened production due to a supposed decline of agriculture, and to advise, therefore, that more persons engage in farming for the purpose of increasing the product. This position is met by an editorial of the New York Tribune, which holds that intermediary trading combinations are responsible: