204 BuuEAu OF Farmers' Institutes. 



profits, like his, are immensely diminished, and many of them, 

 like him, are offering? their farms to an^-body who will pay a good 

 rent or buy at a reasonable value. Thus an unnatural and in- 

 tensely pernicious competition is set up^ — set up by our own gov- 

 ernment, mind you, for which we pay — between farmers of the 

 older States, for the disposal of their property. -So, of course, the 

 value shrinks; the farmer falls out of the rank in the social scale 

 that he ought to hold, because his property has so little money 

 value; for, say what you will, a man's standing in society is regu- 

 lated very largely by his supposed financial means. And if he 

 wants to borrow monev on his farm, he finds not only that it will 

 be valued far below what would be normally a reasonable sum, 

 but also that lenders are rather loth to advance money on farm 

 security at all, because the sale of such property is slow and uncer- 

 tain. 



It is maddening to think of. The American farmer ought to be 

 the most independent being on earth, and one of the most envied. 

 Of all property in this country, a farm ought to be the most 

 desired and the quickest in demand. There should be a dozen 

 would-be purchasers or tenants bidding against each other for 

 every farm that there is supposed to be a chance to get. Farm 

 mortgages should be the most sought for of all investments, and 

 the interest should be reduced, by competition of lenders, to about 

 half of what now has to be paid, while the amount that can easily 

 be borrowed should be about twice what it is now. It is all very 

 well to blame the farmers of the older States for bad manage- 

 ment when they fail to make money, and hoot at the idea that 

 " farming don't pay." The marvel is that it pays as well as it 

 does; the glory of the eastern farmer is that he can make head- 

 way at all, with this horrible burden on his back. 



Xow consider the equities of the case. This is no sort of a sec- 

 tional plea, no setting up of one part of the country or one class of 

 our people as entitled to any kind of special favor from the gov- 

 ernment or special protection from competition. Not a bit of it; 

 nothing like it. The simple fact is just this: The public lands 

 belong to the people at large, and it is distinctly opposed to the 

 interest of the people at large that any more of them should be 

 brought into cultivation, because our great basal industry, the in- 

 dustry on which all other American indnstries depend, is agricul- 



