270 LAND AND LABOR. 



mass of half employed or fully idle laborers, who form 

 the force from which the bonanza farmers draw their 

 supply of labor, will disappear. They will become 

 fully employed, where their wages will be constant 

 and remunerative, and the necessity for tramping 

 over the country to find an occasional day's or week's 

 work, will have ended. At seed time, when the bo- 

 nanza farmer would need a body of laborers to appear 

 as formerly, and prepare his ground and sow his fields, 

 they will not show up ; and at harvest, if it is ever 

 reached, the harvesters who formerly did that work 

 will be otherwise engaged, and there will be none to 

 take their places. The bonanza farmers, like all other 

 employers, will be limited to the number of laborers 

 that find constant employment upon their estates. 

 The transient employe will have disappeared. 



Thus those large estates will become unmanage- 

 able, unprofitable, and be broken up. Instead of 

 competing with the small farmer as at present, and 

 driving him out of the field, the bonanza farm will 

 inevitably crumble to pieces, and be divided more 

 rapidly into small holdings than they have developed 

 into their present magnitude, and will become the 

 homes of a strong and thriving people. Every large 

 estate that thus disappears will be the removal of an 

 element of weakness from out of the nation ; and 

 every small holding that becomes so established will 

 be an addition to the strength of society. In this 

 grand break up and reformation the opportunity for a 

 change in the condition of the tenant farmer will be 

 sure to appear, for there can be no very general im- 

 provement in the condition of these great interests 



