The Montgomery advertiser., 1908-05-18
THE FARMERS PROSPERITY.
It is the Result of the System He Ha
 AdOpted.

American Review of Reviews.
 If the American farmer went out of business this year he could clean up thirty thousand million dollars. And he would have to sell his farm on cred 1t; for there is not enough money in the whole world to pay him half his price.
 Talk of the money mad trusts! They might have reason to be made if they owned the farms instead of their wa tered stock. When we remember that the American farmer earns enough in seventeen days to buy out Standard oil. and enough in fifty days to wipe Carnegie and the steel trust of the in- dustrial map, the story of the trusts seems like "the short and simple ar- nals of the poor"
 One American harvest would buy the Kingdom of Belgium. king and all; two would buy Italy; three would buy Aus tria- Hungary, and five, at a spot-cash price, would take Russia from the Car. 4 tt eA ~. -s
 Talk of swollen fortunes! With the setting of every sun the money box of the American farmer bulges with the weight of twenty-four new mill lions. Only the most athletic imagi- nation can conceive of such torrent of wealth.
 Place your finger on the pulse of your wrist and count the hearbeats-one, two, three, four. With every four of those quick throbs. day and night. a thousand dollars clatters into the gold bin of the American farmer.
 How incompreh ensible 1t would seem to Pericles who saw Greece in her golden age, if he could know that the yearly revenue of his country Is now no more than one days pay for the men who till the soil of this infant re- public!
 Or, how 1t would amaze a resurrect- ed Christopher Columbus If he were told that the revenues of Spain and the earnings of the American farmers hen!
 Merely the crumbs that drop from the farmers table Otherwise known as agricultural exports) have brought him in enough of foreign money since 1892 to enable him, if he wished. to settle the railway problem once for all by buying every foot of railroad In the United States.
 Such is our new farmer-a man for whom there Is no name in any Ian guage. He is as far above the farmer . of the story books as 1908 touring g car is above a jinrlkisha. Instead of being an ignorant hoeman in a barn yard world, he gets the news by daily mail and telephone; and Incidentally publishes 700 trade journals of his own. Instead of being a moneyless peasant. he pays the interest on the mortgage with the earnings of a week Even this Is less of an expense than it seems, for he borrows the money from himself out of his own banks, and spends the bulk of the tax money around his own properties.
 Farming for a business, not for a livfng-this is the motif of the new farmer He is a commercialist-a man of the twentieth century. He works as hard as the old farmer did, but in a higher way. He uses the four Ms mind, money, machinery and muscle but as little of the latter as possible
 Neither Is he a Robinson Crusoe oi the soil. as the old farmer was. Ills hermit days are over: he IS a mar among men. The railway, the trolley | the automobile and the top buggy 1 have transformed him Into suburban ite. In fact, his business has become so complex and many-sided that he l touches civilization at more points and l lives a larger life than If he were one of the atoms of a crowded city. | All American farmers. of course. are not of the new variety. The country l like the city. has its slums. But after having made allowance for exceptions 1t is still true that the United States Is the native land of the new farmer He is the most typical human produce that this country has produced, and | the most important. For in spite of 1t: 1 egotistical cities, the United States 1! still farm based nation.