Address, “Conservation of Land and the Man”
Mrs. Lund—It is a great pleasure to follow Dr. Condra, because his speech is such a good precedent for what I have to say.
If the masses of the American people knew what one man could accomplish for himself, physically and financially, upon from one to five acres of land, this knowledge would revolutionize the life of the Nation. The congestion in our cities is more than a country-wide menace. It is an unnecessary outrage. There is land, good, health-giving land, enough for all the people.
The conservation of the man has been too long overlooked. The commercial policy of the Nation could scarcely be called far-sighted—so wasteful have we been of all natural resources.
We have despoiled our forests, impoverished our soil, given away the public domain. Our labor conditions in many respects shame us in comparison with other nations. Looking about today, it would seem that our thought has been “Get all we can, no matter how, and waste it as we will, for after us, the deluge!” But a new commercial and political spirit is being born; a renaissance of righteousness is setting in, and the commercial leaders of the country are taking stock, as it were, of the actual situation.
Big business men are realizing that a healthy man is worth more in dollars and cents than a half sick one; it is recognizing that sanitation is a good investment. It is beginning to wake up to the fact that the children are more valuable producing machines when they are well protected, housed, fed and educated. The cry of the philanthropist to give because it was right and necessary that these conditions be ameliorated, has met with only sporadic response, but this new call to do the right thing because it pays in dollars to do it, is meeting a greater answer from the people.
Little Farms Magazine found it impossible to evade the responsibility imposed upon it by its readers. We roused them to a desire to go out upon the land—to try the new condition. They came to us for information. We could not go into the land business. We decided to form “Forward-to-the-Land Leagues” in all principal cities.
Moneyed men are not asked to contribute alms but only to invest their money at a nominal rate of interest, which the workingman with his own home and garden, with health and a living assured, is willing and able to pay. This has been proved where the experiment has been tried in the manufacturing cities in England, and in such communities as San Ysidro, Southern California, in our own country.
The work of the Little Farms Magazine in the founding of these Forward-to-the-Land Leagues has been unique and necessary. And its purposes two fold.
In the first place, it was of the utmost importance in meeting the grave problems confronting the nation, particularly that of the bringing our ratio of agricultural production where it safely balances the ratio of population, to have a medium by which knowledge of the intensive methods of agriculture could be brought to the individual.
The widespread interest in the forward-to-the-land movement, which has been taken up alike by press and magazine, has created a hunger for specific information which occasional columns of general news can not satisfy. Little Farms Magazine tells, specifically, how a small acreage will yield and has yielded, industrial independence. It quotes stories of those who have made good after leaving the old work of bookkeeping and clerking and taken a “little farm.”
The problem which the farm presents today is not the same as that of yesterday. The loneliness and isolation no longer obtains. The message that the Little Farms Magazine takes to the world today is that scientific agriculture makes the acreage necessary for individual maintenance so small that social life can be developed on the farm in the most ideal manner. The magazine advocates the upbuilding of the social center, with its library, its clubhouse and gymnasium, its moving pictures and mechanical music.
As I came through the country from the Pacific Coast and saw the empty acres of farm land waiting, and then entered the big eastern cities, and looked into the hopeless, pallid faces of its people, I could think that the earth, if it had a voice, would cry aloud with the cry of Him of long ago, who said: “How often would I have gathered thee as a hen gathereth her chickens, but ye would not.”
Chairman Wallace—There are fifteen minutes left. If Mr. Barrett, President of the Farmers’ Union, is here we would be glad to give it to him.