The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1921-11-17
TOPEKA STATE JOURNAL
Information Bureau
FREDERIC }. HASKIN, Director.
Washington, D. O.
OUR DEBATING FARMERS.


| is easier to get.
Recently a colony composed of over
| 200 families left for Peru, where the
| Peruvian government has granted the
coionists a tract of $4,000 acres of
agricultural and forest land. More
and more American farmers are going
to Australia and the Australian gov
eminent is making every effort to have
| them come and stay. In Mexico land
I of the richest kind may be had for a
very low price, and many enterpris-
| ing young American farmers are
| taking advantage of the fact, as con-
fidence in the present Mexican govern
ment grows. American farmers have
been going to Canada for years, and
the number of them who cross the
northern border is always on the in
crease
The reason for this emigration is
obvious In this country there is no
longer any free government land
vate holdings of land are held at such
high valuation that an investment in
, them for agricultural purposes will not
pay a fair return. The young Ameri-
can, farm raised, who has from two to
ten thousand dollars to invest in a
farm, soon learns, if he is alert, that
he cannot get profitable start for
that money in the United States. AMI
that he can get one in another coun-
try.
Americans are poor colonizers, Ioath
to leave home, slow to learn new Ian
guages and customs. They lag be-
hind almost all of the European peo-
pies in colonizing the undeveloped
parts of the earth. But the need for
land is the primary need of the human
race. Men will go, in the long run,
where they can get the best land for
the least money.
European Farmer Go Elsewhere.
At the same time that our farmers
are leaving, record breaking numbers
of Europeans are coming in. But they
are not, to any considerable extent
taking the place of the departing
farmers. It is perfectly well known
lrls Europe that all of the free and
cheap land in the United States is
gone. 1t is known that South America
and Mexico and Australia are now the
Ravens of the land-hungry and the dis
possessed. The Intelligent German
and other European farmers, of the
type that came to the United States 40
years ago, are now going to Brazil
and Mexico. In both of those coun-
tries there are large German colonies
Italian and Spanish farmers head for
the Argentine, which is now full of
them. Meantime we are getting, not
farme who would feed u.s. but immf-
grants of the type who have to make
living in the large cities, chiefly by
petty trade. While our farmers go
out, a host of peddlers, tailors, shop
keepers, bootblacks, and walters is
pouring in.
1t needs no special argument to
prove that this is not a desirable con-
dlt1on. The question is to what ex-
tent it may be improved.
In part, no doubt it is inevitable AS
the country fills up the amount of
land available for settlement is bound
to decrease. Men seeking land are
sure to go elsewhere, both from this
country and from other countries. No
doubt the next two generations, with
population increasing at its present
rate, must see the United States be-
come more and more a land which
men leave.
The unhealthy and avoidable part
of the situation is that, altho oUe
farmers are leaving us, our land is
only half cultivated. If our. agricul-
tural lands were all in the highest pos
sible state of productivity, if the nation
were doing all in its power to feed
itself, like Belgium or the Netherlands,
for example, then it would be inevita-
bic that young men seeking farms
should go elsewhere. But when these
young men go away leaving great
areas of farm land in the northeastern
states abandoned, and great areas of
swamp in the South unreclaimed, and
stump lands in the northwest, rich in
soil that are being neither reforested
nor cleared for agriculture, then there
is a sickness in the industrial system
of the country just as serious as a
failure of assimilation in the human
body.
Value of Land Speculative.
All who have studied this question
seem to agree that the basic trouble
lies in the speculative price at which
lands are held in this country. With
the population of the earth increasing
al nf fha fiT11a 1qOfbiney iG certain
as that land will constantly increase in
value. Buy any piece of productive
| land and hold it long enough and you
can sell it at great advance. This
increment works with the force and
| regularity of a law of nature. AS q
result, all land in this country, and
| in every other country where no free
| land is available, is he4d at a valua-
ton based, NOT on what it will produce
in food and other commodities, but on
what it will sell for at some future
| time. This simple fact is the whole of
| the trouble.
For this reason all of the vast mass
| of legislation designed to help the
| farmer by teaching him cooperative
marketing, and giving him hog cholera
| serum, and showing his wife how to
cook and so on, is irrelevant to the
main issue. In point of fact, the
farmer who owns a piece of produce
| tive land is not at all badly off. He
| cannot make much money, but If he
| practices diversified farming in an in
| telligent way, he can and often is, one
I of the best-fed and most comfortab BILE
men in the world. City people in this
| country often live on rations that to
| the more substantial sort of country
| people would look like starvation. u 1t
/ is only the farmer who foolishly stakes
! his all on one money crop, like cotton
/ or tobacco, who encounters actual
want
The trouble is not that the farmer
| who owns farm is suffering. The
trouble is, first, that he can sell his
farm, invest the money in mortgages
and make more without working, in
many instances, than he can make by
farming his land. Second. he can
often rent his land to someone else
more profitably than he can work If
himself Third, if he has several sons,
the ones that do not inherit the farm
cannot afford to buy one in this coun-
try. They either go into other lines