LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE 55 



of the savings bank as the best form of in- 

 vestment of funds. Yet the American farmer 

 who hung on has seen his dollars, invested in 

 land, return him an increment unearned and 

 apart from the wages of labor three times as 

 large annually as savings bank interest. Hard- 

 hack goat pastures and mellow prairie loam 

 fertile with the decaying vegetation of thou- 

 sands of years have doubled in value in less 

 than nine years. The "unearned increment" 

 with which the American farmer has been buy- 

 ing automobiles and gasoline tractors in these 

 ten years put more money in his pocket an- 

 nually than the utmost labor which he and his 

 sons were able to expend on an acre of pro- 

 ductive land not scrub land in any single 

 year between 1883 and 1902. 



The mere possession of an acre of improved 

 land has become more valuable to the land- 

 lord throwing out the item of "rent" entirely 

 than the sweat of the brow expended by his 

 tenant farming at the sunshine-and-rain rate 

 which has guided our husbandman since his 

 fathers went "west." 



Land has suddenly assumed value as an in- 

 vestment, not alone for what it can produce in 

 food, but, in addition, because it is a magic 



