CHAPTER lYfcv**! * 

 THE " BACK TO THE LAND " MOVEMENT 



AN ideal held by a great many people in this Republic is a 

 sturdy and substantial class of farmers, owning and tilling their 

 own small farms. The farm is pictured in song and story as the 

 true home of health and happiness as well as the very foundation 

 of wealth and independence. Doubtless many of our forefathers 

 shared the opinions of Jefferson when he fondly looked upon 

 agrarian democracy as the goal of the new Republic; when he 

 considered a large wage-earning class as well as a large commercial 

 class (depending upon the " casualties and caprices of customers") 

 as full of danger, corruption and subservience. To use Jefferson's 

 own words: "Generally speaking, the proportion which the aggre- 

 gate of other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its 

 husbandmen, is in the proportion of its unsound to its healthy 

 parts and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its 

 degree of corruption." As to a wage-earning class: "Let our 

 workshops remain in Europe . . . The mobs of the great cities 

 add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do 

 to the human body ... I consider the class of artificers as 

 panderers of vice, and the instruments by which the liberties of a 

 country are generally overturned." What would be Jefferson's 

 opinion of his country to-day? Just after our Civil War the slogan, 

 "Forty Acres and a Mule," was taken up by the people of the 

 North and the carpet-bagger of the South, as the ideal solution 

 of the negro problem in its economic aspects. 



To-day from press and pulpit, from publicists and legislators, 

 comes the cry, "Back to the Land." Now that seventy million 

 of our people live in villages and cities, and only thirty million 

 live in the open country, the problem of the "small farm," of the 

 "closer settlement" is becoming a very interesting one. The cry 

 is, "Back to the Land." The drift is away from the land. The 

 situation is perplexing. What should be the attitude of the honest 

 patriot towards this condition? What have other peoples in other 

 lands found out about this question of the small farm? 



The question of the big farm versus the small farm was a 

 very hotly debated question in England three-fourths of a century 

 ago. Good farming must perish with the breaking up of large 



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