The Salt Lake herald-Republican. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1909-1918, 1910-03-03

The New York Herald ehuckles at
the following response to the slogan of
Back to the Farm!"
In your issue of February there APP
peared a letter on the cost of living,
signed &C. w. Nosten, Litchfield. Me, -
In reply to which 1 wish to ask Mr.. Nos
ten how many consumers are there in
New York who have from $1,000 to $4,000
TO spare to buy farms and TO place COM
petent farmers in charge?
That is about one-third of the letter
printed in the Herald; and it furnishes
that paper food for an editorial indors-
ing the view of it's correspondent.
Either the correspondent and the New
York Herald editor are mistaken, or
the race has greatly deteriorated in the
past hundred years.
Does that beggar of logic think the
farms of this country were made by
rich men? Is it the notion of New York
people that the wilderness was con-
quered by capitalists?
If so, they are mistaken. The farms
fifty years ago and in even earlier times,
were made by men who had little Il
anything but the chance to cultivate the
land. Men have that much now. If
the members of the breadline had the
stuff OF which their fathers and their
grandfathers were made, they would get
out of that line, and go TO the land
which is waiting for them-wall1ing, if
necessary-and there they would make
their homeland make 1t secure. Since
they cannot do it, they confess to less
strength and less manliness and less
worth than their ancestors had And
that is a shameful confession.
This is not an idle retort to what we
regard as a foolish letter in a New
York paper. 1t is simply the statement
of fact. This continent was reclaimed
from a condition of nature by poor men;
by men who had to walk to their land;
by men who had to clear the Iand when
they reached it; by men who had to
depend on their own resources for food
while they were raising grain; by men
who fought beasts and winter and diff
Guilty, and grew so strong that, unitedly,
they made nation. And without their
work there never would have been a ma
ton here.
Men of today, however poor, should
not be less able to win a farmland an
independence-than were their fathers.
The obstacles now cannot be so great
as they We're half a century ago. Every
state of the Union was reclaimed and
cultivated and enriched in just the same
way.
Utah is an especial example of state
making. Can our New York contempt
rary find a hundred out-of-work men
in that great city with less of material
warrant for hope than the pioneers Of
this state had? And yet they came
across a thousand miles of desert by the
most difficult method imaginable-and
here they established themselves, and
their children have homes and plenty.
The women came, some Of them push
ing carts in which all their possessions
were packed. But they came and they
suffered, and they endured. But they
made an independent and a self-sus-
tanning commonwealth.
All the farm land of the United States
was bought with sacrifice and effort,
and by men and women of courage and
strengthened of little else.
Shall the shameful confession be made
that the men of the east today are lesser
creatures than were those who changed
the wilderness into a nation?