PREFACE 



This is a story written with a definite purpose. 



The phenomenon being forced at this moment upon the atten- 

 tion of a population of 100,000,000 in the United States and 

 Canada, possessing almost illimitable areas of what one hun- 

 dred years ago was mostly virgin soil, finding itself actually 

 importing foodstuffs at high prices, must inevitably cause those 

 genuinely concerned in the health, prosperity, and therefore in 

 the happiness of the people, to seek seriously for such explana- 

 tions as if not wholly satisfactory may, at least serve to make 

 prominent certain social, economic and scientific facts intimately 

 associated with the phenomenon. 



During the past decade, with a series of years of successively 

 average crops, and the influx of some 10,000,000 immigrants, 

 largely of the working classes, there has been witnessed an 

 aggregation of people in the urban centres of the United States 

 and Canada exceeding the total number of this immigration; 

 while the total increase in the number of persons cultivating 

 the land has been relatively small. 



The demands of railway construction, of industrial expansion 

 and of city building have given temporary employment to work- 

 men; while the opportunities for the centralized investment of 

 capital have resulted in the development of speculative enter- 

 prises and in the diversion of both public attention and private 

 capital from the true basis of all wealth, the cultivation of the 

 soil. 



The inevitable outcome of these several combined causes is 

 today being brought home to both peoples in certain economic 

 effects, which, though unpleasant and distressing to many, will 

 not have been without salutary and beneficial results if they 

 serve to turn such again toward those essential virtues and 

 simple pleasures which have ever been associated with successful 

 agriculture. 



That the attention of the best and most substantial citizens 

 of both countries, leaders in industrial enterprises and in the 



VU 



