income, with higher prices for the things to be
purchased, keeps the retired farmer a poor man. The result is that the
retired farmer is opposed to every step of progress in the growing town
in which he lives. He opposes every increase of taxation and fights
every assessment. He dreads a subscription list and hates to hear of
contributions. Although an intelligent and pious man, he has come to be
an obstacle to the building of libraries, churches and schools and
opposed to all humane and missionary activities. He is suffering from a
great economic mistake.

Before leaving the exploiter it is to be said he also has his church.
The exploiter has built no community. He has contributed the retired
farmer to the large towns and small cities of the Middle West. It is
natural, therefore, that few exploiter churches are found in the
country. But in the larger centers there are churches whose doctrine and
methods are those of the exploiter. Indeed, at the present time the
exploiter's doctrine in ethics and religion is highly popular. It is
the doctrine of the consecration of wealth.

There are in the larger cities churches whose business is to give;
Sunday after Sunday they hear pleas and consider the cases of college
presidents, superintendents of charities, secretaries of mission boards
and other official solicitors. These churches have systematized the
discipline of giving. Their boards of officers control the appeals that
shall be made to their people. Such churches are highly individualist in
character, and the preacher who ministers in such a church has a
doctrine of individual culture and responsibility.

The exploiter's doctrine of systematic giving has gone into all of the
communities in which prosperous people live. It has become a moral code
for millionaires, and the response to it is annually measured in the
great gifts of men of large means to institutions which exist for the
use of all mankind.

But not all the farm exploiters retired from the farm. The stronger and
more successful have become absentee landlords. These men have invested
their cash in farm lands. Distrusting the investments of the city
market, and fearing Wall Street, they have purchased increased acreage
in the country, and when the local market was exhausted, they have
invested in the Southwest and the far West, buying ever more and more
land. They have proven that "It is possible to maintain a vicious
economic method on a rising market."[10]