Report of Missouri Farmers' Week. 281 



the things that faces us now. There is no more west. I say that 

 here in America we have been like the Prodigal Son, because there 

 has been that inexhaustible supply of land — these vast prairies to 

 the west of us, and because it was a good deal cheaper for us to 

 pick up and move to new unbroken land, to a virgin soil, as it was 

 in the beginning, just as it was when God created and looked upon 

 and called it good. That was cheaper, easier, and better than 

 building up the depleted farm. But that is a thing of the past; we 

 have come to the end of that now. We have been prodigal towards 

 our resources and we have wasted our substance in riotous living. 

 That is the cause of the condition of the rural farmer today, and it 

 is a religious job to call him back to the God-given plan. 



The Country Life Commission that Theodore Roosevelt sent 

 out reported that from a canvass of 125,000 farmers all over the 

 United States they found it universally true that there was a con- 

 sciousness of a sort of agricultural unrest. We consider some of 

 these things in order to get the problem before us and talk of the 

 relationship that the church may have to this problem. 



There is in the age a spirit of restlessness that moves even on 

 the farm, and that has been especially noticeable in the last twelve 

 or fifteen years. Ten or twelve years ago a man did not put a 

 dollar sign on his front gate. The farm was home to him; it was 

 the home of his fathers; it was a dear place; it was sacred soil. 

 Now that speculation is rife and prevalent, and success is marked 

 by profits on the farm, it is different. I have a clipping here in 

 my pocket from one of our papers in Decatur which tells of a 

 farmer, by many called a fool, who just refused $425 an acre 

 for Macon county land. That farm was home to him. Do you 

 know there are some things money cannot buy, some things that 

 money cannot touch, some things that you cannot put a dollar mark 

 on! Of course, that farm is not worth $425 on the market, but 

 there are memories there, associations and influences, and a kind 

 of hovering of visions over that 80 acres so dear to that man that 

 no price can measure such values. I want to tell you that people 

 of that kind are rare, the old-fashioned man that does not put a 

 dollar mark on his front gate and sell out and go somewhere else. 

 And so we have that restless spirit that lays hold of our farmer. 

 In the central part of our state of Illinois 52 per cent of the farms 

 are in the hands of renters. Between the owner of the soil who 

 will not put any improvements on the land, because he can get 

 just as much cash rent for it without improvements, and the tenant 



