162 



The Dawn of a New Constructive Era 



Business 



Problems 



Involved 



dealing especially with the South, and I shall not go into it any 

 further. 



Now, as to the business questions involved. Those of you 

 who. own this land, have no doubt spent many worried days and 

 nights trying to devise a scheme by which you could sell those 

 lands. The average owner of cut-over pine lands in large areas 

 wants to sell. That is the uppermost thought in his mind. I 

 do not think that should be the uppermost thought. I think the 

 first consideration, under existing conditions and viewed from 

 the business standpoint, is that every owner should desire to im- 

 prove those lands and make them more valuable than they are, 

 so that he can get more nearly what they are really worth for 

 agricultural purposes. We have been told here that pioneering is 

 not a trait of the modern farmer. I know this is the case with 

 the American people, and especially when they attempt to work 

 as corporations or to use large aggregations of capital. I know 

 that the very small farmer, who has no means and nothing to 

 work with but his own hands, is handicapped in developing his 

 farm, because he has neither the means himself nor possesses 

 the credit to obtain them; and the question of what the land- 

 owner should do to fit those lands for farming, all the way be- 

 tween those two extremes, is a problem which has to be thought 

 out from a business standpoint. There are certain things, how- 

 ever, which we may conceive as already demonstrated and ac- 

 cepted facts. In the first place, I want to mention the fact that 

 these lands belong to the people who hold title to them, and 

 they have a perfect right to use them for their own purposes, and 

 they have a perfect right to exclude people who have cattle, for 

 example, but have no land and raise their live stock by grazing 

 them on the other man's land ; and that right must not be denied 

 to the owners of these lands if they choose to fence them ; and 

 there comes in an important question which I think is going to 

 be at the basis of developing these lands for live stock purposes. 

 In many sections of the cut-over pine belt, tick eradication has 

 made splendid progress ; in others, we are going to have a great 

 deal of trouble to complete that process. There are conditions 

 under which there is going to be great difficulty in getting that 

 work supported. I think every owner of cut-over land should 

 tion BZisTf insist that his land be freed from ticks, and if he cannot get the 

 Cattle Indus- cooperation of the other people of his community to free that 

 try whole parish from ticks, he can at least reserve to himself thie 



Tick Eradica- 



