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.