§8 BULLETIN 1295, U. S..DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE 
in turn, have intensified the need for rapid selling and consequently 
the expenses of sale. 
The inevitable result of these methods has been to make the road 
to settlement extremely easy. These facilities have necessarily been 
provided at great cost, so that some of these firms were unquestion- 
ably selling wild land at prices several times the prevailing whole- 
sale level of price for wild land, and these high prices did not 
necessarily mean large profits for the concerns themselves, but were 
made inevitable by the heavy expenses for service, by risks involved 
in exceedingly liberal credit, and by the heavy expense of rapid 
sale. Furthermore, making the road to settlement so easy tends 
to attract a class of settlers who are not of the highest type either 
in experience or financial capacity; in other words, people who 
have failed to accumulate sufficient capital to establish themselves 
by the ordinary methods of self-help and some of whom are doubtless 
overpersuaded to undertake the hardships of land settlement in the 
wilderness. 
The question may be raised whether the public interest is ad- 
vanced by this artificial diversion to the land of a class of people 
not particularly well suited for the business of farming, and a large 
proportion of whom have been brought from cities. "This question 
is especially pertinent when it is recognize that there is normally a 
large overflow of farm population from the country to the city, 
and that the type of land settlement under consideration diverts 
from the city to the country a class of people who by training, habit 
of mind, and financial ability are probably not well suited for farm 
life under pioneer conditions. 
A more natural process of land settlement would seem to involve 
some of the following elements: 
1. A careful selection of the land to be settled. 
2. Diversion to the land only of those who in the natural course 
of things are seeking to become farmers rather than those induced 
to become farmers by an elaborate system of advertising and sales- 
manship. 
3. Selection of those ah sufficient experience and capital so that 
the responsibility of the land settlement agency will be a minimum 
while a maximum of responsibility is left to the individual initiative 
and self-help of the settler. 
4. Sale of land at a reasonable price and on convenient credit 
terms as to repayment and low rates of interest, but not on terms 
that are too easy from the standpoint of initial contribution by the 
settler himself. In other words, it may be questioned whether it is 
a kindness to make it too easy for a person to become a settler under 
too large a burden of indebtedness in proportion to the equity of the 
settler himself. 
This discussion has shown that a lumber company which has good 
land may be in a somewhat better position to approximate these 
requirements than a dealer who is compelled to sell quickly because 
of the heavy burden of carrying charges; and that if the lumber 
company is still engaged in lumbering operations, this will create 
especially favorable conditions for successful settlement. In other 
words, given good land and reasonably good transportation facili- 
ties, a policy of effecting settlement at the same time with the cutting 
of the timber has many Pady antages. 
WASHINGTON : GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1925 
\ 
a 
