The Dawn of a New Constructive Era 193 



pull the stump from the ground. It is not drudgery to work 

 with the dynamite he uses ; and it is not drudgery to pile the 

 stumps. It has all passed from the man's back to machines and 

 horses, and wherever we have been able to show we have re- 

 moved the drudgery we have made the cut-over lands popular. 

 To use a specific instance : On one demonstration a man came 

 from Iowa to buy land, and he came to the demonstration and 

 I heard him tell the man who had him in tow that if these men 

 could clear land with as little back work as that, I can, too ; and 

 he bought 450 acres of land at $25 an acre. 



We don't try to pull green material. From our experience 

 we find it will cost three times as m,uch to clear green land as 

 after four or five years. Put stock on it. Work it and seed it 

 with whatever it grows best, and then put it to sheep and cattle, Deaden 

 or to dairying. Goats are all right ; they are the best browsers "'"P* «- 

 there are; and if you have a wide range, all right; but if you 

 have it fenced you will have to put in a 38-wove wire fence and 

 barbed wire or they will cut it. 



As to the follow-up work: It was apparent that if we ad- 

 vocated an equipment that would take $200 to buy, it was plumb 

 out of the realm of a great many of those settlers ; if we could 

 form a small society of three, four or five men — not more than 

 five — and arrange for the purchase of such equipment as we 

 would advise, that would reduce the cost to about $40 apiece. 

 Then we went to the banks and said, "These men want to get 

 an outfit of this kind; they can probably clear five times as 

 much land with this equipment as with their older devices" ; and 

 in every case the banks said they were willing to loan money 

 up to half of that equipment, and three-fourths of the banks 

 said they would loan all the money. 



The Wisconsin Advancement Association, a group of men 

 who have pooled their interests and paid 1 cent an acre for the 

 advancement of those lands, organized a campaign for the pur- 

 chase of stump pullers and explosives. Forty per cent dynamite Co-operative 

 had been retailing in the neighborhood of 17 or 18 cents. They ^f f'"'?""". 

 proposed to put in, in carload lots. They have now, together ^^^^^^^ 

 with the aid of the explosive company, been able to put in 

 twenty carloads where there had been only cases sold before. 

 In every case where one of these carloads were going in there 

 had been only three or four hundred pounds sold during the en- 



