228 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK 
the working farmer, not to the landholder as such. They would 
not be absorbed into the value of the land, to burden the next 
buyer in the full measure of their benefits. 
The removal of the subsidy to agriculture represented by the 
increase in the value of land would restrict cultivation to the 
lands that actually pay. The gradual lifting of the burden of 
debt would lighten the pressure to produce the maximum volume 
of cash crops. The tendency to overproduction would in so far 
be abated. 
IX 
With good roads and the automobile, with rural post, the tele- 
phone and radio, with a marvellous variety of labor saving devices 
for lightening the burden of the farm and the household, we have 
in this country at the present time the technical basis of the 
richest and most agreeable country life in the history of the world. 
But we have permitted these gifts of fortune to be turned against 
us. The paved highway is a road by which the best blood of 
the country flows swiftly to the cities. The automobile and 
farm machinery serve to transform the young man who might 
have become an able farmer into a half-baked mechanic. The 
selephone and radio ceaselessly din the seductions of the city into 
the ears of the children of the open fields. The sky and sun and 
the good brown earth are abandoned to moron and peon. 
It is not by any law of nature, but because of a lazy habit of 
mind that assumes that if laissez-faire and free movement serve 
well to govern the traffic in peanuts and popcorn, gimeracks and 
gewgaws, therefore they must also serve well to govern the 
exchange of lands and homes, the price men pay for the right to 
produce a people’s bread, the price they may exact of others when 
they in turn choose to shift to the urban side of the national 
economic equation. 
We shall be a sound nation when we have a sound agricul- 
ture. We shall have a sound agriculture when we free it from 
speculation and a swift turnover of holdings, with its consequence, 
unbearable debts, an indemnity upon the land. We can do it 
without disturbing any just rights or equities. If we choose.