THE EMBARGO ON FARMING 195 



tive. They work long hours, they receive relatively 

 low pay, they have few of the comforts and pleasui-es 

 of the city.^ There are also 2,354,676 tenant farm- 

 ers, and the life they lead and the precarious returns 

 they receive are not such as to lure men to farming 

 or to retain boys and girls on the farm who have 

 been reared in tenant families. 



Men not only remain on the farm under the most 

 difficult economic and social conditions, but three 

 centuries of experience proves that the hunger for 

 land is probably the most powerful economic mo- 

 tive known to man. It is as operative to-day as 

 it was in the days of our grandfathers. In the 

 years just before the European War several hundred 

 thousand farmers moved from Iowa, Kansas, Ne- 

 braska, and the northwest into the undeveloped 

 regions of western Canada. They were drawn by 

 the free or the comparatively cheap land of a new 

 countr}^ And it is free land that has been the at- 

 traction that has peopled America from the begin- 

 ning. It was this rather than religious or political 

 liberty that lured the English, the Scotch, and the 

 Irish, the Germans and the Scandinavians to this 

 country from the first colonists in Massachusetts 

 and Virginia down to the pioneers who fiUed in the 

 Western prairies after the Civil War. Generation 

 by generation the sons of settlers, the discontented 



^ See Report of Commission on Industrial Relations, vol. 1, p. 320, 

 and vol. 10, pp. 9059 et. seq. 



