104 COMMISSION OF CONSERVATION 



a buffer area between the improved land and areas avaliable for new 

 settlement. Because of speculation improved farms in good dis- 

 tricts in the United States and Canada are often too dear to enable 

 purchasers to make an adequate profit after allowing reasonable 

 interest on the capital cost. 



When the price of land is high the mortgage and interest charges 

 have also to be high. Farmers should co-operate, not only to 

 secure improved credit facilities from their governments, but to 

 eliminate speculative values of farm lands which prevent adequate 

 security being given to private investors. When excessive prices 

 are paid for land it means that there is so much capital withdrawn 

 from productive use. One of the greatest causes of farming being 

 unprofitable is that the average farmer has not sufficient work- 

 ing capital; and when he has to borrow money he has to pay too 

 high a rate of interest. Private ownership of land requires to be 

 buttressed with cheap capital to enable improvements to be carried 

 out for the purpose of making economic use of the land; but cheap 

 capital can only be attracted on a sound basis of laud valuation. 



The Spirit of Gambling 



There are forms of speculation which are not directly connected 

 with farming itself, but which pursue the farmer and take his hard- 

 earned savings to bolster up some crazy financial enterprise. Mon- 

 seigneur Choquette, in a paper read at the seventh annual meeting 

 of the Commission of Conservation, strongly condemned the allure- 

 ments which were permitted to follow the farmer into the most dis- 

 tant parts of the rural districts, and which resulted in the farmers 

 bartering their farms "for a scrap of paper which guaranteed them 

 the ownership neither of an inch of land nor an ounce of silver." 

 That is an aspect of the problem of speculation which is rather out- 

 side the scope of this report, but it shows the wide ramification of 

 the spirit of gambling which is doing so much injury to agriculture 

 and from which the farmer wants to be saved by legislation. 



Speculation in Western Lands 



In an address delivered in Winnipeg on December 18, 1916, Sir 

 James Aikins, Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba, stated that out 

 of about 100,000,000 acres of arable land, granted to homesteaders, 

 railway corporations, the Hudson's Bay Company, and other private 

 interests, only one-third was being used for productive purposes. 



