T is always interesting to come out here

IT

at this time of year, when the great spring drive is on. Plowing-time and seed-time are past. The crops are in and under cultivation,-they are "coming on," as the technical term is, and it is now the season of devout expectancy, of restrained and decent optimism, tempered by thoughts of hail, drouth, pest, blight, and the multitude of contingencies that make the hazards of agriculture.

But one is doubly interested in being here this year, when every possible pressure has been brought to bear on farm production. The Government, the press, the schools, and every public agency that can be enlisted are all campaigning for production. There is a prospect of topnotch prices, which has set the bureaus of agriculture and the farmers' associations hard at work planning emergency methods to increase productivity. One can now begin approximately to see the results of all this, and one finds them very impressive. Really, they are bound to be, since farming is the greatest single industry in the United States.

One remembers Mr. Jefferson's idea that we should never be anything of a manufacturing people, but depend on our farm products and our natural resources to pay our way in the world. It might not have been a bad plan, taking one thing with another. It would have saved us the Civil War, our share in the present war, our troubles with industrial immigration and a protective tariff, and the accumulation of huge industrial fortunes, five items which in themselves foot up to a decent total, to say nothing of the indirect benefits to which they give rise. Our reaction on the rest of the hemisphere and on Europe might have been different and doubtless better. There is

not much use in thinking about such things now, but they do well enough to entertain oneself with against the tedium of train travel through these immense stretches of agricultural land.

The land of the free and the home of the brave may be open to criticism in some respects, but certainly not in point of size. Its most notable feature is that there is plenty of it. Notable, too, is the apparent reluctance on the part of the free and the brave to come out here and farm it. One wonders about this. There is a strange inconsistency visible here; and not only visible, but held so steadily before one's eyes that after a short time one can scarcely see anything else. I refer to the prodigious, almost almost inconceivable amount of idle soil. It makes one doubt the sincerity of all the talk about shortage. If things are as bad as they say, why does one see such a boundless wilderness of land that is not only untouched, but looks as though it never had been touched? There is no end of it. Farming naturally. has its best foot forward along the railways, of course; yet to one who has the average European standards always more or less in mind it seems even there to be a sadly hamstrung industry. One ends a day's journey with the feeling that the earth's resources are merely fumbled. In comparison with the amount of idle land, the farmers seem few and the production scanty. The train stops at some settlement; one sees people grubbing in twopenny dooryards, and school-children feebly pottering over vacant town lots, with apathy in their gestures and rebellion in their hearts; and then one journeys on for hours in view of an untouched, unproductive, interminable, and monotonous outdoors! The contrast is striking and unpleasant. One great railway company,

owning thousands of acres of first-class prairie land, idle, has plowed its stationlawns, and put them down in vegetables!

One can never forget the impression that all this makes the impression of levity or a kind of histrionic or movieattitude toward what is said to be, and really seems to be, a great emergency. It raises importunate questions. Why are there so few farmers? Why is production so slight and methods so wasteful? If we must feed ourselves and the greater part of Europe, too, why not put this land to work? If we are so hard up for food that there is talk in Congress about confiscating the supply, why not pay some adequate attention to the source of that supply?

The thing seems inexplicable in its defiance of the simplest logic. The farm is the final market of all industry and commerce, since every one must eat, and food is rapidly becoming scarce and dear in the markets of the world. Then, with these dismal prospects in view, to come out here and be haunted day after day by this phenomenon of idle land, one can scarcely believe one's eyes. Either the talk of famine is a bogus scare, or else some economic law which does not stop at famine is at work. There is no escaping that dilemma. I thought for a while that possibly my sense of proportion was giving way a little and that things were really not so bad as they looked, therefore as soon as I could get hold of the census reports I examined the statistics of the situation, and they gave me the cold shoulder with a vengeance.

At this moment of hue and cry for increased production, with the papers forecasting "drastic" food-control, "drastic" rationing, “drastic" measures against foodhoarding and speculation, "drastic" pricefixing, when people spade up tennis-courts

and lawns, and even the poor politically exploited school-children languidly poke about in the rubbish-laden vacant lots—at this moment there are four hundred million acres of idle land in the United States of America! Seventy-three per cent. of the arable land of the country is therefore idle. Forty-five per cent. of the actual laid-out farm-land—nearly half— is idle!'

One feels like descending to the slang of the street and asking, Can you beat it? There is only one inference to make; any one would make it. Drop a man down from the moon into the midst of that state of things, and the moment he set eyes on it he would say, "There is a country with a first-class problem of land-tenure on its hands."

And so indeed it is. In point of importance, urgency, and difficulty, this problem transcends and effaces every other social and political interest in the West. In my judgment, too, the best sign of the deepened and stabilized life of the West is seen in the fact that at last a sense of this has dawned clearly into its consciousness. Heretofore the West has not paid much attention to the basic economics of farming. The farmer has not thought beyond prices and distribution problems, chiefly those personified by the middleman. The exploiters of the farmer, naturally, have done all they could to keep his mind from straying beyond these superficial matters. But now the farmer has become aware that improved farm methods and prices and distribution control do not help him much, that they are a mere economic stimulant with an equivalent reaction. Like the backwoodsman's flint-lock, they kick as far as they carry. He has discovered that something is the matter with production itself, and that the disorder is constitutional.2

The awakening is late, but such seems to be the way of our slow-witted race with what might be called the low-visibility type of social disorder. If a mad dog comes to town, a posse organizes itself almost instantly; but a polluted watersource is sometimes allowed to spread typhoid for years before anything is done about it. So the farmer has always been keen about prices and markets, but only now has come to see that his real difficulty has its economic root struck far deeper; that no matter what prices he gets or how completely he controls distribution, the general economic status of his industry is not improved.

Beside the immediate pressure on production due to the war, another agency has signally helped to precipitate and clarify the more or less turbid and diffuse thought of the West on this subject; namely, the course of recent events in other countries that are struggling with the same problem. The Northwest, for instance, has for a next-door neighbor the aggressive and powerful Grain-growers' Association of Canada, and has been for years an attentive observer of its campaign for free trade and fiscal reform. Possibly the new agrarian movement led by the Farmer's Non-Partizan League had its inception in the example of the Graingrowers; at all events, it owes much of its economic enlightenment to that cause. The Southwest, too, could not fail to be affected by the Mexican Revolution, with its program of freedom of access to the land. The boldly confiscatory attitude of the new Mexican constitution toward land and natural resources, and the Revolution's candid showing-up of the relation between monopolization of these resources and industrial peonage, could not help catching the attention of the neighbors. Meanwhile the Russian Revolution came along, and while the press has consistently minimized the importance of land monopoly as a factor in this historic struggle, and in general has said as little as possible about it, an inkling of it has nevertheless leaked out and seeped through large portions of our population.

The result of all this is that the subject of land-tenure is now very much to the fore. Even some of the college professors are writing about it, and one could scarcely say more than this. It has undergone one of those curious and sudden transformations whereby the heresy of yesterday becomes to-day's orthodoxy, or to-day's radicalism becomes to-morrow's commonplace. Economic diseases are like any other; some of them are long unfashionable and never talked about, and then suddenly come in for a great run of interest. We all remember when the current economics of transportation or of chattel slavery or of protective tariffs were acquiesced in as part of the settled order of the world, and any attempt to question them was regarded as mere indecency and crankery; yet somehow, no one perhaps. can quite say how, the spot-light of general attention suddenly focused on them, and they were then for the first time seen as they really are. Similarly the West has come to see the current economics of agriculture with a critical vision, and no longer to accept them with a gesture of vague acquiescence.

Nothing like it has taken place in the country before. There have been organized movements to improve the condition of the farmer, but their apprehension of the problem was superficial and inadequate, and their leadership invariably ignorant and usually meretricious. The Free-Soil Democrats seem to have had a glimpse of a sound principle. In their resolution of 1852, "that the public lands of the United States belong to the people. and should not be sold to individuals nor granted to corporations, but should be held as a sacred trust for the benefit of the people," there is a kind of echo of the doctrine of public property laid down by Mr. Jefferson. But their proposal that "it should be granted in limited quantities, free of cost, to landless settlers" was economically about as unsound as policy against which they protested. Later agrarian movements, however, failed with both principle and method; the Populists, for instance, strayed off into fantastic.

oddities like the free-silver doctrine. Mr. Bryan himself, curiously, has never shown a spark of intelligent interest in the basic economics of agriculture, though he hails from Nebraska, where all his life their book has been open before his eyes. No more may be said of Roosevelt, Wilson, Hiram Johnson, or any other national figure of the so-called Progressive type, no matter how advanced. In a country of mere instrumental statesmen like ours, where the coach-dog theory of political leadership is the only one permitted to prevail, that a leader's function is to see which way the political coach is going, and then run out in front and bark,this is pretty good evidence that the American people as a whole have never been much preoccupied with their relation to the land.

So perhaps it is no very remarkable fact that the United States has never had a land policy. In the early days Mr. Jefferson seems to have been the only one to have a clear view of the relation of population to the land, and to foresee the possibility of a serious problem of land-tenure. Hamilton's idea, which on account of its penny-wise ease and simplicity carried an irresistible appeal to vulgar minds, was that the vast area of the West should be sold off as fast as possible and the money used to "reduce taxation," to carry on the Government and wipe out the public debt. On this most extraordinary theory an enormous amount of land was actually sold at a price between one and two dollars per acre. After two or more years of this the plan was modified somewhat to favor bona fide settlers. Then presently came the fat and joyous season of land grants to railways and other corporations. The dancing was good while it lasted, and very lively; but about thirty years ago— or one may put it with sufficient exactness in 1890-the piper suddenly called it off and demanded his pay. In other words,

Ever since, or for approximately thirty years, land in the United States has not been priced according to its earning capacity, but according to its speculative value. Farm-land in the West has not been bought for farming purposes; bless you, no, farming was never thought of except as bait on a prospectus. It was bought as an investment. From 1900 to 1910, for example, while available acreage in the United States increased five per cent. and the number of farmers increased a trifle under eleven per cent., the value of farm-land increased one hundred and eighteen per cent.

That tells the story so completely that any enlargement on it is mere verbiage. If one merely wished to prove the existence of a first-magnitude problem of land-tenure in this country, one might save time and trouble and some wear and tear on the reader's patience by stopping with those three percentages. But there is more to it than that. These land values are increasing at the rate of five per cent. a year or better,' and their ownership is concentrated into very few hands. Three per cent. of the population own nearly all the land values in the United States.

As soon as one gets a sense of this