638 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



been forced back to the cities, many of them as unskilled laborers, to 

 swell the ranks of the casual unemployed, and many of them have 

 cursed the state as a delusion and a snare, have shouted their mis- 

 fortunes from the housetops, and have thus injured California in the 

 eyes of their sympathizers here and elsewhere." Evidence of this sort 

 could be cited ad infinitum. 



There seems to be no one who would take the case against those 

 who advocate making easier and more attractive the approach to the 

 land. The farm is the natural outlet for our overcrowded cities. It 

 is out of the rural districts that we must hope to get the backbone of 

 our citizenry. Almost all proposed unemployment solutions that 

 pretend to thoroughness look to the land for relief. 



Assuming the desire to get on the land, along with the means and 

 ability, the first requisite is a knowledge of available holdings. Today 

 practically all information of this sort is compiled by railroads, cham- 

 bers of commerce, boards of trade, or the promoters of some land pro- 

 ject. These are naturally interested parties. There is nothing to 

 show the prospective purchaser just how much and wherein he should 

 discount their enthusiasm. 



We should like to see a state land bureau, to supply at cost to 

 prospective purchasers all needed information regarding the best eco- 

 nomic uses of land, its value, approaches to market, and the like. It 

 is more essential to start the settler right than to guide him after he 

 may have taken up an almost impossible proposition. Closely related 

 to the work of a state land bureau is a comprehensive land law that 

 will make more difficult fraud and misrepresentation in the sale of 

 rural lands, and that will bring to speedier justice the violators of the 

 same, and give equity to the exploited. We have our regulation of 

 weights and measures, and our pure food laws, but it is of vastly 

 greater importance to the community as a whole that the prospective 

 purchaser of farm lands be protected, both against exploitation and 

 against his own ignorance. The enforcement of such a law might be 

 given over to the proposed state land bureau. 



203. CAUSES AFFECTING FARM VALUES' 

 BY GEORGE K. HOLMES 



Farm real estate in the United States has gained in value in such 

 a degree since the census of 1900 that an examination of the causes of 

 this gain may be not only interesting, but instructive, to the economic 



1 Adapted from Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1905, pp. 511-21. 



