482 THE WORK OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE
increasing extent in place of the slower and less profitable
manual labor employed in our fields fifty years ago, which
is still so employed in most other countries. If the industrial
portions of this country have imposed a constant burden upon
our farmers by attracting their labor into the cities, they are
repaying the debt by furnishing the farmer with iron slaves
capable of outworking hand labor as to speed, efficiency,
and cheapness. Nowadays, machinery can be depended upon
to shell and grind corn, plant, reap, and shock wheat, cut
silage, hoist hay, thresh grain, and perform many other tasks
essential to wholesale farming. Neither has the farmer’s wife
been slow to adopt such mechanical, labor-saving devices for
her churning, washing, milking, and separating.
All these invaluable machines are manufactured by corpora-
tions, many of the larger of which have in the past depended
upon the Stock Exchange for their capital. Still other corpora-
tions which have similarly financed themselves furnish the
farmer with various petroleum products, fertilizers, tractors,
etc. Moreover, apart from the tools of his trade, the farmer
is enabled, along with the city dweller, to obtain the innumer-
able comforts and luxuries of life through corporations with
listed securities. These days the farmer drives his pleasure car,
uses a telephone, buys merchandise by mail from the great mail
order houses, employs electric lights in his home -and in his
barns, and enjoys the artistic and educational programs brought
to him by his radio. In the creation of all these things, also,
the Stock Exchange plays an indirect but essential part.
For all the perennial misunderstanding which has existed
between town and country even before the days of Horace, the
farmer is a hard-headed thinker, with a firm and stubborn
grasp upon the realities of life. He is a conservative and con-
structive individualist. It is a real tribute to his sound sense
that Socialism and its glib theories about abolishing property
and the like almost invariably make little appeal to him. Even
in Russia this has been so; for although Bolshevism swept the
cities and towns, it has made little real progress out in the coun-
