The Dawn of a New Constructive Era 207 



in most of the counties beside, a trained home economics agent 

 who will be ready and willing to aid new settlers. If you will 

 can settle upon your lands with a reasonable show of being able 

 simply do your part and make conditions such that homeseekers 

 to succeed, we will help them to do the rest. 



The Cut-Over Acre — What 

 Is It Worth? 



By William R. Lighton 



Fayetteville, Ark. 



Producing power is the only real measure of value of an}' 

 source of wealth, whether it be a railway, a manufacturing in- 

 dustry, a mine, or an acre of agricultural land. So, as a matter 

 of course, we must know producing power before we can judge of 

 value. 



Standard oil stock, steel stock, the soundest industrial stocks 

 on the list, would be going a-begging if nobody had ever taken 

 the trouble to find out anything about their earning capacity. 

 That, and that alone, fixes their worth. 



By the same token, the largest^ single item in the wealth of 

 the Southern states, their undeveloped land, hangs heavy and 

 remains undeveloped simply because there is no general and ac- 

 curate understanding of what it is able to do. Today, for just 

 this reason, we are talking about the future use of this land as a 

 problem. So it is ; but the problem does not lie in the character 

 of the land itself. The trouble lies in the poverty of our knowl- 

 edge. If the plain facts were known, then there would be no Value of Cui- 

 problem at all. How could there be, in a time when the re- Over Lands 

 motest corners of the continent have been searched for new lands ' ^ noivn 

 which might be made fruitful even with vast expenditure of Elated 

 money and labor; in a time when far-off deserts have been pain- 

 fully reclaimed, when the forbidding semi-arid regions have been 

 peopled, and when the ceaseless cry of the world is for a supply 

 of food to keep pace with increasing needs? Yet here are these 

 lands of ours, countless millions of acres, not unproductive, but 

 their productive capacity a matter of blind guess-work in the 

 minds of most of us. 



