republic. 'How to keep the farm lands of America in the hands of the
native farmers of this and the coming generations? How to help them to
help themselves?' The decree has gone forth. The small farm and farmer
must go. They are doomed. A great wave of land monopoly, rolled up by a
large class of very shrewd, far-seeing capitalists, is even now sweeping
across the continent. Seventy-five years hence only a pauperized
peasantry of ignorant farm laborers, bound to the soil as hopelessly as
the slave to the master, will coin their lives of ceaseless, unrequited
toil to swell the rent roll of the non-resident landowner, who, as lord
of the domain, through his heartless agent, will exact his tribute to
the uttermost farthing. Must the sons and daughters of the farms of this
republic come to the bitter heritage of such a life? Surely! We have
already seen the beginning of the end! The sad case of my father can be
duplicated a hundred times or more in almost every county of our western
states. States that are incalculably rich in their magnificent domain of
broad acres of the most fertile land the sun ever shone upon; capable,
when permanently placed in the hands of a properly equipped,
scientifically educated class of people, of producing the food supply of
the world: but under the blight of the monopoly system, history will
repeat itself. Our agricultural interests will languish and wither;
dependent manufactures, and all branches of exchange and commerce, must,
in time, follow. What then will happen to society? To government of both
state and nation? In the face of this appalling situation, how
stupendous the problem! By what effort can a great counter tidal-wave be
set in motion upon whose crest the salt and salvation of the republic,
the sons and daughters of American farms, may be carried safely to the
permanent heritage of the soil they till? As in the past, so in the
future must we look to them for our true reformers, leaders, thinkers
and statesmen. They are endowed by birth, by constant association in
youth with soil and sunlight, fields and grass, green meadows and mossy
brooks and, best of all, doubly endowed by the inbreathing of ozone
laden breezes from mountain and forest, with that rare combination of
nerve, moral, mental and physical stamina, courage and patriotism which
is necessary to preserve this republic and to keep it, ever and always,
a model of progressive excellence for all the nations of the earth. Thi