"Yet, after all our years of toil and privation, dangers and hardships upon the ... frontier, monopoly is taking our homes from us by an infamous system of mortgage foreclosure, the most infamous that has ever disgraced the statutes of a civilized nation. ... How did it happen? The government, at the bid of Wall Street, repudiated its contracts with the people; the circulating medium was contracted. ... As Senator Plumb [of Kansas] tells us, ‘Our debts were increased, while the means to pay them was decreased.’ [A]s grand Senator ... Stewart [of Nevada] puts it, ‘For twenty years the market value of the dollar has gone up and the market value of labor has gone down, till today the American laborer, in bitterness and wrath, asks which is the worst: the black slavery that has gone or the white slavery that has come?’" in the speech lease was reacting primarily to the problems faced by which of the following fgroups
