“The poor farmers,” Ernest once laughed savagely; “the trusts have them both coming and going.”

And that was really the situation.  The seven great trusts, working together, had pooled their enormous surpluses and made a farm trust.  The railroads, controlling rates, and the bankers and stock exchange gamesters, controlling prices, had long since bled the farmers into indebtedness.  The bankers, and all the trusts for that matter, had likewise long since loaned colossal amounts of money to the farmers.  The farmers were in the net.  All that remained to be done was the drawing in of the net.  This the farm trust proceeded to do.

The hard times of 1912 had already caused a frightful slump in the farm markets.  Prices were now deliberately pressed down to bankruptcy, while the railroads, with extortionate rates, broke the back of the farmer-camel.  Thus the farmers were compelled to borrow more and more, while they were prevented from paying back old loans.  Then ensued the great foreclosing of mortgages and enforced collection of notes.  The farmers simply surrendered the land to the farm trust.  There was nothing else for them to do.  And having surrendered the land, the farmers next went to work for the farm trust, becoming managers, superintendents, foremen, and common laborers.  They worked for wages.  They became villeins, in short—­serfs bound to the soil by a living wage.  They could not leave their masters, for their masters composed the Plutocracy.  They could not go to the cities, for there, also, the Plutocracy was in control.  They had but one alternative,—­to leave the soil and become vagrants, in brief, to starve.  And even there they were frustrated, for stringent vagrancy laws were passed and rigidly enforced.

Of course, here and there, farmers, and even whole communities of farmers, escaped expropriation by virtue of exceptional conditions.  But they were merely strays and did not count, and they were gathered in anyway during the following year.*

* The destruction of the Roman yeomanry proceeded far less rapidly than the destruction of the American farmers and small capitalists.  There was momentum in the twentieth century, while there was practically none in ancient Rome.

Numbers of the farmers, impelled by an insane lust for the soil, and willing to show what beasts they could become, tried to escape expropriation by withdrawing from any and all market-dealing.  They sold nothing.  They bought nothing.  Among themselves a primitive barter began to spring up.  Their privation and hardships were terrible, but they persisted.  It became quite a movement, in fact.  The manner in which they were beaten was unique and logical and simple.  The Plutocracy, by virtue of its possession of the government, raised their taxes.  It was the weak joint in their armor.  Neither buying nor selling, they had no money, and in the end their land was sold to pay the taxes.