CHAPTER XXIV 



THE farms of this country are more heavily mort- 

 gaged than ever before. In many of our best agri- 

 cultural States, the majority of the men on them are 

 tenants or hired men, with little or no capital, less edu- 

 cation and few aspirations. Many of them foreign- 

 ers, having no conception of our free institutions. 

 This situation is full of pathos and fraught with dan- 

 gers not simply because farms are mortgaged, but 

 because those mortgages have, during fruitful years, 

 increased more rapidly than ever before, in which 

 millions have multiplied in the hands of those who 

 traffic in food stuffs which the farms produced. Nor 

 is it because some men are tenants and others labor 

 for a wage, but because most of these men labor with 

 little hope of ever acquiring a competency or a home 

 of their own. This accumulation of property less peo- 

 ple on our farms is a new situation a new phase in 

 the economic life of the Nation. How long will this 

 class of people, if they continue in hopeless toil, turn 

 a deaf ear to the Socialists and the Bolsheviki, who 

 expatiate on their wrongs, and suggest a divison of all 

 property and the leveling of all classes? 



Under existing war conditions, agriculture has 

 ceased to be an academic question to be dreamed over 

 by school masters and philanthropists, and to be eulo- 

 gized by politicians and profiteers; but has become a 



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