INTRODUCTION 9 



the greatest profit possible But if, according to our point of view, 



rural economics remains the science of the internal organization of the 

 agricultural enterprise, we shall not commit the mistake of confining it 

 within too narrow limitations and excluding from its province all that con- 

 cerns the relationships of the enterprise with the outside world It 



is, so to speak, the agricultural science of sciences, not because it claims a 

 quality of superiority, but because it draws upon them all and sums them 

 air up to speak the last word of technological science, profit* 



Here in the United States, anything approaching systematic study 

 of the economics of agriculture was deferred until a very recent day. 

 The extraordinary circumstances of the free-land period tended both 

 to direct men's minds away from purely economic theorizing, and to 

 mislead them when they did attempt to pass strictly economic judg- 

 ments upon what was taking place in our agriculture. The outstand- 

 ing facts about our farm situation were those of national enlargement, 

 the growth of a home market for manufactured products, eternal 

 speculation in land, and the providing of an attractive alternative of 

 free enterprise on the farm for all who had accepted wage or salaried 

 positions in trade or industry. Psychic satisfaction, speculative gain, 

 the need of protecting an investment in land, or the inability to get 

 away from a sorry venture in farming these, with immigrant wage 

 and living standards and blindness to the facts of impairment of fer- 

 tility, conspired together so to obscure the issues as to actual costs of 

 production and return to labor and capital that the whole situation 

 touching the supply of agricultural products was thrown into con- 

 fusion. Men acted as though they conceived themselves to be living 

 under an economic moratorium, and the probability of an ultimate day 

 of settlement was calmly disregarded. But the naive assertion that 

 "rainfall follows the plow" met tragic refutation in the years that 

 followed 1883, and the widespread collapse of farm prices in the 

 eighties and early nineties brought a strong revulsion from the craze 

 of agricultural adventure. 



1 E. Jouzier, ficonomie rurale, pp. 14-16. By way of formal definition, he says 

 (after giving the Greek etymological meaning of the word "economics"): "The 

 addition of the modifier rural simply marks out the boundaries of the field for which 

 it is to be understood. Instead of saying the household, we should say the rural 

 household. And as the rural household is the farm, or, more precisely, the agricul- 

 tural enterprise, we shall say that rural economics is the branch of agricultural science 

 which 'teaches how to organize the various elements which constitute the resources of 

 the cultivator whether in relation to each other or with respect to persons,' in order to 

 assure the greatest prosperity to the enterprise" 



