44 The State and the Farmer 



such estates are bound to come in some of 

 the remoter regions. We should now be suffi- 

 ciently established in democracy to have for- 

 gotten our early alarm at such estates. Very 

 likely we shall repeat to some extent the expe- 

 rience of Germany and other countries, where 

 leadership of large agricultural estates has 

 contributed to welfare. 



In the discussion of abandoned farms, I fear 

 that we have been misled or even scared by a 

 phrase. We have accepted the term " aband- 

 oned farms " as itself a statement of fact and 

 have seemed to reason from it as if it pre- 

 sented a single condition of affairs. Our im- 

 agination has often outrun our reason. It is 

 not so much a question of abandonment as 

 of shifting occupancy and radically changed 

 conditions. If these conditions had been ex- 

 pressed with equal emphasis by some other 

 phrase, the discussion of the question might 

 have taken a wholly different direction. Sup- 

 pose, for example, that a part of the problem 

 had been expressed in the term " farms be- 

 coming forested:" the least imaginative of 



