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 homieseekers 

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



The Cut-Over Acre — What 

 Is It Worth? 



By William R. Lighten 



Fayetteville, Ark. 



Producing power is the only real measure of value of any 

 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 largestj 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 Cut- 

 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 dgted 

 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. 



