THE NEW ERA IN POLITICS 267 



ing should be an agency of service. Yet our credit 

 resources are concentrated in the speculative cen- 

 tres, principally in New York, when if our banking 

 system were designed for service and adjusted to 

 the encouragement of production, it would be dis- 

 tributed as widely as possible throughout the 

 counti"}'. 



Agriculture waits on such an extension of the 

 farm-loan act that the farmer can borrow to market 

 his crops, so that the tenant can borrow to operate 

 his holding, so that the tenant and the farm-laborer 

 can borrow to buy a piece of land and become a 

 home-owTier. We must end the conditions described 

 in earlier chapters in Texas and Oklahoma, where 

 the farro.ers and the tenants are the prey of the 

 banks, which make use of their power not only to 

 keep the farmer in subjection but to secure posses- 

 sion of the land by foreclosure as well. 



Three — tenancy must be ended. It has no place 

 m any country, least of all in Ajnerica. Tenancy is 

 a curse to the tenant. It is a curse to the land. 

 Tenancy means shiftless cultivation. It means the 

 exhaustion of the soil. It means lack of initiative, 

 industry, or ambition. Wherever tenancy is found 

 there we have ignorance. There we have a decay 

 of civic virtues. There we have the kind of condi- 

 tions that prevailed in Ireland, that prevail to-day 

 in England, that prevail in every country that has 

 failed to concern itself over the condition of the 



