characterized the past two decades.[7]

There are those who exploit the child vitality of the families of
working people, and the States have put legal checks in the way of child
labor. The exploitation of the labor of women has gone so far as to
threaten the vitality of the generation to be born, and laws have been
passed which forbid the employment of women except within limits. The
ethical discussion of the past decade is largely a keen analysis of the
methods of exploitation of resources, of men and of communities, and an
attempt to fix the bounds of the exploitation of values for private
wealth.

There are those who exploit the farm. "Farms which from the original
entry until 1890 had been owned by the same family, or which had changed
owners but once or twice, and whose owners were proud to assert that
their broad acres had never been encumbered with mortgages, since 1890
have been sold, in some instances as often as ten times, in more
numerous instances four or five times, and a large part of the purchase
price is secured by encumbering the estates!"[8]

Agriculture, especially of the Middle West, is affected in all its parts
by the exploitation of land. To a traveller from the Eastern States, the
selling and re-selling of farm land, without fertilization or
improvement by any of the successive owners, is a source of amazement.

"The new lands opened under the Homestead act of half a century ago were
often exploited for temporary profit by soil robbers who were experts of
their kind. Owing to such farm management, the yield of the acre in the
United States gradually decreased. Very little intensive farming was
done."[9]

The commercial exploitation of land dissolves every permanent factor in
the farm economy. The country community of the land-farmer type is being
undermined and is crumbling away under the influence of exploitation.
The pioneers were a Westward emigration, pushing Westward the boundaries
of the country at the rate of fifty miles in a decade; but since 1890
emigration has been eastward, and it is made up of farmers who move to
ever cheaper and cheaper lands to the East, the tide of higher prices
coming from the West. Already in central Illinois the values of land
seem to have reached the high water mark. About Galesburg "the Swedes
have got hold of the land and they will not sell." Among the last
recorded sales in this district were some at prices between two hundred
and two hundred fifty doll