338 Singing Valleys 



up against enlightenment. It works so hard. As though it 

 thought that by the grimness of its labor, and its stoicism 

 under suffering, it could push back the dawn. 



So while one farmer accepted the fact that a plant took 

 something out of the earth to make it grow, and that that 

 something was not restored to the soil by one winter's bliz- 

 zards or the April rains, and that even rotted cow manure did 

 not contain all the food elements the corn needed, his neigh- 

 bor went right on planting his corn in the same ground year 

 after year. When the harvests fell off, he blamed the seed corn; 

 or a late frost; or a dry spell in July. When smut blackened 

 the ears, he laid it to too much rain. When the corn-root worm 

 and the corn-ear worm infested his fields, he lamented that 

 the frontier had closed and that there was no more cheap land 

 lying farther west that he could move on to, as his father and 

 grandfather had moved. 



A depression in agriculture had already set in during the 

 seventies. After the war years, prices fell. Surplus crops 

 mounted. The burden of debt settled on the farmers in the 

 corn belt who had helped to feed the Union. In the twenty 

 years between 1880 and the opening of the new century, 

 tenancy in this country rose 10 percent. In that period, though 

 American agriculture extended its horizons, it was in reality 

 being operated at a small profit or at none at all. What sus- 

 tained the individual farmer was the constant rise in land 

 values. Land which he had bought at $1.25 the acre, with 

 thirty years in which to pay it, he sold at $25.00 the acre to 

 newcomers from Europe, eager to settle on American farms. 

 If he did not sell, the high value of his land enabled him to 

 convert his floating debts into mortgages. The natural result 

 was that mortgage indebtedness became heavier every year. 

 Every year a large and still larger share of the farmer's crops 

 went to pay interest charges, and taxes which went up steadily 

 with the increased valuation of the land. 



After the Revolution, Daniel Shays had led Massachusetts 

 farmers against the bankers whose power had stretched out 



