3 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and improvements. But it can not be long, without a change of 

 proprietors, the original ones dropping their title, and giving up 

 the struggle to other lists of unfortunates. 



There is no doubt but that the investments in these vampiric 

 mortgages are good that is, good for those who loan the money, 

 and good also for those roving or stationary agents who make 

 their commissions out of them, and who scour every Eastern 

 town where money is to be had to put into this form of security. 

 I am not blaming these negotiators. The money must be bor- 

 rowed, and somebody must furnish it. But is it not pitiful that 

 the one business in this world which seems nearest to man's primi- 

 tive nature, without which no other could exist, and into which 

 the moralist and the well-wisher of his species is ever ready to 

 advise young men to go, should be the selected prey of the most 

 destructive and cruel legislation that can be invented by the wit 

 of man ? 



All over the statute-book, if there is a law made having any 

 effect at all upon the farmer, it is with an almost malicious cer- 

 tainty one might think, if he judged by its effects made to 

 operate against him. Is it a half -holiday, or several whole ones, 

 that are enacted ? The operation of them is not a help to, but is 

 a draught against, the farmer. His cows and his crops, and Nature 

 itself, to whose laws he is more than anybody else tied down, 

 will not and can not accept their supposed advantage. His work 

 must still go on ; and these are only new stumbling-blocks in his 

 way, which leave him shorn of his hired help, to pursue his tasks 

 without the customary assistance. If an eight-hour law is enact- 

 ed, its maleficence, not its advantage, falls on him. The milking- 

 hour and the harvest will not be postponed in obedience to any 

 legislature. So far as it makes the day's labor brief, so certainly 

 it extends his own labor from twelve hours to fourteen. 



Notice, too, how every tax system now uppermost puts the 

 heavy end of its incidence on the farmer. In the State, county, 

 and township allotment of fiscal burdens the tax is direct. It 

 falls upon what can be seen and discovered with greatest weight. 

 But it never fails to discover the farmer. His broad acres can 

 not be hidden or sworn away ; while his neighbor, rich in per- 

 sonal holdings, can cunningly suspend his own tax by evasion 

 and sometimes by an artful change or confusion of residence so 

 as to add his tax, too, to the tax of the beridden farmer. 



But worse than all this is his relation to the national tax 

 system, which exploits away his hard-earned profits, small in 

 percentage, almost invisibly, and then adds abuse to injury by 

 successfully persuading him that it exists for his supreme advan- 

 tage. He pays for a paper, as likely as not, which tells him, and has 

 been telling him for a generation or more, that the beneficent sys- 



