Our Soils. 5 



plenty of men ready to take a mortgage on it for 

 enough to enable him to purchase the necessary 

 tools, and there you see him a full-fledged American 

 farmer. It is, indeed, a most serious predicament in 

 which the public land policy of our Government has 

 placed the farmers of the Eastern States. They are 

 not only made to sell their products at cost and less, 

 but their lands have depreciated in value fifty to 

 seventy-five per cent., until many farmers in the 

 Eastern States have been driven to bankruptcy, all 

 for the sake of keeping up that boastful, useless, 

 wasteful practice by the Government " that Uncle 

 Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm," and of 

 setting up thousands of foreigners annually in the 

 farming business until competition is so keen that 

 there is nothing left the farmers in the older States 

 but unremitting toil. Their sons and daughters are 

 thereby driven from the farm, and their places are 

 being filled by foreigners, until we are fast becom- 

 ing reduced to the condition of the peasant farmer 

 of the old world. Farmers they are not. They are, 

 more properly speaking, a lot of land pirates. 



They have a good farm given them, and imme- 

 diately they begin to live on its fertility like a lot of 

 highwaymen. Have I overdrawn the picture? I 

 wish you might say I had. If you think so, look 

 about and see how many one hundred, one hundred 

 and fifty, or two hundred acre farms there are in 

 your county, where the hired man gets about all 

 the yearly profits, while the owner, with a ten or 

 twenty thousand dollar investment, and his wife as 



