THE FARM LAND 45 



home the slogan, "Vote yourself a farm." 40 Railroads with gov 

 ernment land to dispose of sent out propaganda, dispatched 

 agents to the East and to Europe to spread the news of cheap, 

 fertile land that a man could get for his own at almost no cost. 

 The federal government, through the Land Office in the De' 

 partment of the Interior, and state governments held out the 

 bait of free land to all men whose courage was as great as their 

 land hunger. 



And so they came by the thousands, from Germany, from 

 Ireland, from Scandinavia, from the eastern seaboard of the 

 United States. They were farm tenants who saw a chance for 

 independence, they were farmers who had exhausted their soil 

 in the East. They were clerks, and small merchants, and factory 

 workers who wanted to escape from the growing cities. 



THE GROWTH OF THE "FARM PROBLEM*" 



But as the farming areas of the Middle West filled with 

 hopeful farmers, many of them found that they had not 

 really escaped from their troubles. In some cases it was a 

 matter of exchanging old troubles for new ones equally diffi' 

 cult. The settlers had assumed that once they had a piece of 

 soil they could call their own, they would grow rich merely 

 by producing grain and meat. True, once the steel plow had 

 been invented to turn over the thick, black prairie sod, they got 

 undreamed of crop yields. The growing cities of the East and a 

 large foreign market for American grain absorbed these products 

 of the West. The chief basis for the foreign market was the re" 

 peal of the Corn Laws in England in 1846. These laws had 

 levied a duty on grain shipped into England. When they were 

 repealed, American grain became England's cheapest source 

 of supply. 



But having a market was not enough to bring prosperity to 

 the new farmers. With the Civil War had come the invention 



40 Parrington, op. cit., p. 128. 



