PROBLEMS OF COUNTRY LIFE 107 



fortunes, in no other way can the domestic peace of the millions 

 of coming Americans be guaranteed. This too must go into the 

 policy. 



After all, who is The Farmer? And where is the land which 

 he wants? The attempt to answer these questions brings us 

 very near to the crux of the situation. Not far from half the 

 acreage of our better lands is owned by one group and operated 

 by another. Who then is The Farmer? When two families are 

 attempting to live off the same farm, one of them in idleness, or 

 when eleven families are living off ten farms, with whose in- 

 terests do those of the public lie ? 



In one county of Illinois, twenty per cent, of the farm lands 

 are said to be owned by men who have never seen their properties 

 because they live with other interests on the Atlantic seaboard, 

 collecting rent through agents as they clip coupons from stock 

 certificates. 



It is said that the estate of Lord Scully is just now raising 

 the rents of some hundreds of thousands of acres of our best 

 prairie land to ten dollars an acre, or about two thousand per cent, 

 annually of the original cost. Investments and betterments? 

 Not a dollar! For the agent is instructed that if the renter 

 wants a house or a pig pen, let him build it. No investments ex- 

 cept in additional land. Here is a mare's nest for hatching 

 trouble, and the tenants are already reported as organizing for 

 resistance. 



Nobody cares how large is the farm that one man operates 

 economic limitations will control, and the larger the better so 

 far as the public is concerned. But when a man deliberately 

 acquires not one farm but ten farms, not with the intention of 

 occupying any of them or of producing anything, then the public 

 will one day have something to say about the matter. It dare not 

 do otherwise. We shall always have renters, but shall renting 

 and landlordism become typical in the country as it is now in 

 the cities ? If so, in that direction lies trouble. 



Specifically the public wants to know and it will one day in- 

 quire whether capital is invested in land from a desire to operate 

 it or merely from a wish to live without labor and at the same 

 time by speculation to grow rich upon the rise of real estate. In 

 no other form are investments of moderate amounts of capital 



