The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1893-01-25
Editorial NOtiugs.


SPENDING twelve years of our early
manhood in what was then the West, at
a time when the great prairie, between
the hustliug village of Chicago on the
lake, and the Illinois river, bore not a
single house, we have always been
deeply interested in that section OF the
national territory, With the West be.
yond the Mississippi, we have no per.
sonal acquaintance. What we have
learned of it has been through the press,
acquaintance with Western people, and
wide correspondence. Our sympa-
thies are all with national progress; and
the wide freedom and energy which
marks the character of Western men
has not challenged our admiration in
vain.
NATURALLY, it has been the progress
of Western agriculture that has been
most interesting TO us. We expected
that the Western farmer would be in
many resp cts an enlarged Yankee; and
so he has been. We have watched him
very closely, aud saw little that was not
admirable in his character. So long as
he went west, took up his quarter sec
ton at the government price, paid for
it, and went to work at making home
we rejoiced in him, and all his kind.
When the land grant railroads began to
rob and abuse him, we cheered his
efforts to redress the wrong most heart
lily, and, as recently stated, we were
with the first to encourage the spread
of the grange from the West into the
East
WHEN the national government be-
gan to stimulate emigration by making
its western territory free TO railroads
and settle RS aside from discharged SOL
diers), we thought ii pretty generous to
them, and not quite just to The Eastern
farmer. For now fully twenty years
Eastern farm real estate has been fall
ing in value all the time, notwithstand-
ing a considerable Improvement in our
farming, and the great enlargement of
our home market. 1t is not too much
to say-for it is incontestiblv true
that the Eastern farmer has patiently
seen himself sacrificed to the West.
His patience has been due to the fact
that it has been largely his own sons
and daughters who have been the BEN
eiciaries of Uncle Sans rather pro.
fuse liberality. That many foreigners
have been drawn in, by that policy,
still more to decrease his own prosper
lily, he has very well known; but he
has kept still, and hoped for better
times.
THERE is an end, however, to every
mans patience, even that of the Yankee
ufaainer. When he finds the entire sec
b where, with free farms, and the
Wild for a market, over railroads built
by other grants of free territory, the
construction of which he was thus COM
PEELED in part to pay for-and for which
the Immigrant college funds, (thrown to
him as sop have been his sole compen-
sation C)-when, we say, that great glo-
rious and supposedly wealthy West rises
up before us all with bold, greedy eyes,
and demands that our general govern
ment shall loan its people all the money
they want to pay off their mortgages
with, and this at two per cent, these
Yankee farmers beg n to think that the
Western farmer has pretty nearly lost
his wits, and is about as crazy as the
Southerners who wanted us to catch
and return their slaves. These West
ern ideas are not only very new to the
Yankee mind, but very contrary to
anything, in principle or in practice,
that the world has known. In short, if
it should prevail, all the old ideas of
American liberty and equality are gone.
The trouble with our Western
friends, we fear, is too much lust for
land-for more land than they can
make good use Of. They make us
think of an old crank we once knew,
who had seventy pairs of boots, and
generally went barefoot. Now, as a
fact, land, without enough capital and
labor TO handle it to advantage, is an
injury to its owner-unless it is sit
uated where other mems labor is adding
to its value. The right way for the
Western farmer WHO wants to i'm
prove-or for any farmer, East or West,
who is land poor--is to sell off until he
has reduced his land to the quantity he
can own, and properly till. And this
advice is not mere theory. 1t is the
system that has always and everywhere
succeeded, wherever tried. The French
are the most successful farmers in the
world. They are the only farmers