Great Falls tribune., 1921-11-14

elsewhere. But when these young
men 60 away leaving great areas OF
farm land in the northeastern states
abandoned, and great areas of swamp
in the south unrecIaimed, and stump
lands In the northwest, rich in soil
that are being neither reforested nor
cleared for agriculture, then there is
sickness in the Industrial system of
the country just as serious as a fail
ure of assimilation in the human body.
Value Of Land Speculative, Y.
All who have studied this question
seem to agree that the basic trouble
lands are held In this country. With
the population of the earth increasing
all of the time, nothing is so 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 q law of nature. As a
result, all land in this country, and in
every other country where no free land
is available, is held at a valuation
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 his 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 piece of produc-
tive land is not at all badly off. He
cannot make much money, but if he
practices diversified farming in an in
telIgent way, he can be and often is,
one Of the best-fed and most comfort
able men in the world. City people
that to the more substantial sort of
country people would look like star
vation. 1t is only the farmer who
foolishly stakes his all on one money
crop, like cotton or tobacco, who en-
counters actual want.
The trouble is not that the farmer
who owns a 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, then he can make by
rent his land to someone else more
profitably than he can work it him
self. Third, if he had 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
Of work or else 60 to some other coun-
try.
The result is country in which
more and more of the land passes into
the hands of men who hold it idle for
speculative purposes, or rent it, and
in which man who wants to invest
his money in land and to farm it, can
not do so profitably. Inevitably it is
also land in which food prices rise
steadily.
What is the remedy? Two have
been proposed. First, for the nation
or the states to buy and reclaim land
and sell it, to farmers at price based
on what it will produce and on long
time credit This was the essence of
Secretary Lanes scheme of land for
soldiers; which so mysteriously disap-
peared 1t is the basis of the Cali
fornia land and colonization plan,
which has worked so well, and it has
been put into practice in some form
by several other states.
The second method is form of tax
alton on unimproved land which would
make it Improbable to hold such land
for speculative purposes. Such q tax
has always been held sound by stu
dents. A bill providing for such tax
was introduced in the last Congress
by Representative Nolan and reintro-
duced IN this congress by Representa-
tive Keller
It has attracted as much attention
as pin falling into the Atlantic ocean.