84 THE LURE OF THE LAND 



I am not a prophet, although I see visions of the fu- 

 ture. But these visions are confused like the visions of 

 a dream. They are not clearly limned, and I see one 

 problem merging into another, and two conditions of 

 life coalescing; and the light of the vision is not in- 

 tense enough to see the final settlement of all these con- 

 flicting elements. My hope is that there may be devel- 

 oped in this country millions of land owners, so-called, 

 who have a personal interest in the body of land on 

 which they live, who care for it as they would care for 

 their horse or their child, who take a delight in the 

 fertility of the fields and know the methods of maintain- 

 ing it, who are not ambitious for high social or po- 

 litical preferment, but are ambitious to lead clean, 

 wholesome and useful lives of industry, and who, in 

 the association of their neighbors and friends, may no 

 longer be isolated, but may have, in enduring the toil 

 of the farmer, the privileges of social advancement and 

 association. 



And yet this vision, which it seems to me would be 

 the ideal one of the future, is clouded with that other 

 mist of the landed proprietor, with his hundreds or 

 thousands of acres, with his huge machines for plowing 

 and cultivating and harvesting, living perhaps in a 

 palace, and surrounded with the huts of peasants, men 

 who have no interest whatever in the soil itself, but who 

 live simply to have enough to eat and something to 

 wear. There may be a few middlemen by means of 

 which these two conditions may partly coalesce, but 

 to my mind the tendency is either one way or the other. 



Farming, then, will not only become a science but 

 a business, as clearly defined as manufacturing or dis- 

 tribution, and there will be farmer princes and cap- 

 tains of industry, as there are to-day in manufacturing, 



