158 THE THIRD POWER 



It can be made so with us. Indeed, the popular taste 

 is already turning in that direction. There is no 

 business that demands more brains than agriculture 

 if it is properly carried on. But in these days brains 

 must be liberally paid. The competition for talent is 

 severe, and the farm must be prepared to meet it. 

 If there were assurance of adequate reward for 

 farming even the present isolation and loneliness and 

 other unsatisfactory conditions would not repel. 

 Men go to the Klondike and live there simply that 

 they may make their fortunes. They will brave any- 

 thing for the sake of a chance to make their way in 

 the world and to find free scope for the talent they 

 feel stirring within them. The frozen north, the 

 burning tropics, the islands of the sea, nay, the most 

 barbarous and dangerous life — all these call to our 

 young men, and they do not call in vain. Yet they 

 turn their backs with something like contempt on the 

 farm. Is it not strange ? And does not the fact con- 

 demn us as a people ? Surely we can do better than 

 this. The American Society of Equity offers the 

 chance. It would make farming attractive, and 

 would again clothe it with the old seductiveness that 

 it once had for our people in those days when every 

 American citizen wanted to become a landowner. 

 A shame it is that that charm has been lost. But it 

 need not be lost permanently. Even as it is the life 

 has a charm which the shriekers on the floor of the 

 stock exchange and in the wheat pit know nothing 

 of. For the farmer does produce something, and he 



