THE FOOD CRISIS AND AMERICANISM 8l 



How is it that such conditions can exist and the 

 public is so misled concerning them ? There are many 

 reasons. Perhaps one of the most potent is found 

 in the fact that six out of every ten business and pro- 

 fessional men, including bankers and salary earners, 

 and an army of farmers and wage earners, are directly 

 interested in land speculation. Hence, it is prac- 

 tically impossible to secure publicity of anything that 

 tends to check the boom, or that might bring a reces- 

 sion of land prices. The United States Department 

 of Agriculture, whether consciously or unconsciously, 

 has seldom seemed entirely insensible to such influ- 

 ences. As an illustration : Some time since, this De- 

 partment prepared a bulletin, No. 41, the ostensible 

 purpose of which was to show the net earning capacity 

 incidentally the intrinsic value of the farm lands 

 throughout the country. The result, if not the object, 

 of the bulletin seemed to have been chiefly to help the 

 land boom. 



To make this investigation, they claim to have taken 

 a large number of farms in three different States 

 (average representative farms, of course; otherwise, 

 the investigation would have been meaningless) and 

 from these deduced facts bearing upon the question of 

 farm products (incidentally, farm land values). A 

 discussion of this in detail is unnecessary. A few 

 facts and figures will suffice. The first factors in the 

 problem, of course, would be the yield per acre and the 

 price of the leading cereals that year throughout the 

 country. These were as follows : 



