72 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW 



sight, is filed away on the back shelf for future 

 reference. 



Let us call the original pioneers the 

 "Reapers." They picked and chose with dis- 

 criminating taste. When we read the early 

 history of the expansion of the American far- 

 mer over the rich prairies, we find the same 

 picture of waste that we find in the early 

 romances of the plains, where it was usual for 

 a huntsman to slaughter a giant buffalo for 

 its succulent tongue alone, abandoning the 

 huge carcass to carrion. The early settlers 

 cast aside millions of acres that were not prime 

 and ripe for skinning in their rush to find the 

 fat river-bottoms, where the least amount of 

 labor would furnish the maximum returns. 

 Man is innately a conserver of his own labor, 

 with no urging. The same spirit is evidenced 

 to-day in the high capitalization of these iden- 

 tical river-bottoms of the western prairies. 

 The land which will yield most bountifully 

 for the least amount of labor must always be 

 the most valuable in the eyes of a race that is a 

 conserver of its own labor first and foremost. 

 With the exception of the earliest pioneers 

 in New England (who built uncounted 

 miles of stone walls and grubbed stumps in 



