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of better prices. But they could not write any considerable part 
of these high prices into their capital, through the sale of their 
farms, since the community would take most of the advance 
in selling prices. 
A man with a good farm would find it wise to hold it until 
the end of his working life. He would have a privilege worth 
transmitting to a son if the state wisely refrained from taxing 
such inheritances. 
But would not the danger arise that these privileged land- 
owners would eventually become absentee landlords, living in the 
towns or in Florida or California, and stripping the land of its 
surplus? There would be a danger of this unless the State had 
the ingenuity to levy a special tax on lands not operated by their 
owners, a tax heavy enough to discourage the development of this 
form of property right. 
VIII 
It may be objected that such a tax would operate to produce 
a certain rigidity of status in rural relations. A good farm would 
often remain generation after generation in the same family. 
Small farms would not so easily be merged into larger and more 
economical ones; farms that are too large would not be so easily 
subdivided. Suppose we admit that there is something in these 
objections. Yet the disadvantages are insignificant in comparison 
with the benefits that would flow from a better stabilized system 
of farm tenures. 
With the reduction in the rate of farm turnover the mortgage 
indebtedness would be gradually paid off and the balance of 
exchange of products between country and city put on a sound 
basis. The country community would attain the means of 
improvement and would become a more agreeable place to live. 
The greater stability of tenures would not only make the social 
life of the country more satisfying, but it would lay a basis for 
cooperation such as cannot exist where the farm population is 
ceaselessly shifting. 
The gains from cooperation, from improvements in farm prac- 
tice, in transportation, would fall to the farmer as cultivator, not 
as landowner. 
If it appeared desirable to effect an artificial increase in agri- 
cultural prices through public action, the benefits would fall to