106 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



The home-building instinct is not only the greatest known 

 incentive to work but it is also the safety clutch for democratic 

 institutions. We have enjoyed a half century of unexampled 

 prosperity, largely because it has been based upon cheap food 

 food so cheap as not to repay the labor bestowed upon it, to say 

 nothing of capital, of which there was little, or the extraction of 

 fertility, of which there was much. There is nothing that will 

 get so much work out of a man and his family as the desire to 

 own the home that shelters them, and we have capitalized this 

 instinct to the limit, together with an almost total disregard 

 of virgin fertility. This latter component of cheap food is 

 gone; it behooves us now to make the most of the former even 

 though it may somewhat increase the price of food. 



Under existing conditions farmers will do one of two things : 

 require financial returns comparable with those of other people, 

 or settle back upon the primitive self-sufficing system, producing 

 not a supply but a simple surplus over their own needs. In 

 either case more expensive food is inevitable in the one instance 

 from an increased initial cost of production and in the other 

 from a reduced supply. 



From the standpoint, therefore, both of the amount and the 

 price of food it is in every way to the advantage of the public 

 to stimulate the home-building as against the money-making 

 motive among farmers. That way too lies safety for our de- 

 mocracy. To this end it must be made easier for the young 

 people of each and every generation to acquire the ownership of 

 land with such betterments and such opportunities for living and 

 rearing families as may produce ideal Americans. As the land 

 must change operators every generation, it must not be too diffi- 

 cult also to change ownership. 



And we must go on further in our national plan than to make 

 it easy to acquire ownership in land. We must care for this 

 land as a national asset and as a perpetual obligation, in the in- 

 terest of future Americans. Ownership means at best but tem- 

 porary control, and whoever carries in his pocket a deed to a 

 portion of the national domain is in reality a tenant at will, and 

 the conditions of his tenantry should be such decent regard to the 

 fertility of the land he occupies as shall insure increasing, not 

 decreasing, productivity. In no other way can the lives and the 



