Near Gardiner, Maine, is a little forty-five acre poultry and fruit farm which pays its happy owner $3,800 a year clear of all expense. Seven years ago this farm was abandoned by its former owners, who could not make it pay. Five years ago it was purchased by its present owner for a song—and only a half-line of the song was sung at the time. He was a clerk who had lived the little-flat-dark-office-and-subway life until tuberculosis had removed him from his job and threatened his life. Farm work—on his own farm—proved to be a game at which he could play with zest and success. The stakes were a life and a living—and he has won. We—and you, too, no doubt—could multiply narratives from observation and experience, to say nothing of reading.
A WORLD OF OPPORTUNITY
All these experiences and the reports of them are both a part of and a stimulus to the "back to the land movement." This movement has its mainspring in two plain economic facts, namely: first, clerical and other indoor vocations have become overcrowded; second, while crops grow bigger year by year, the number of mouths to feed multiplies even faster, and
unless more land is tilled and all land cultivated more intensively, we shall eat less and less, as a race, and pay more and more for what we eat. Here is opportunity for the men of bone and muscle—opportunity for health, prosperity, usefulness to humanity, enjoyment and happiness. Other opportunities lie in the conservation of our forests and the planting and development of new timber lands; in the building up of new industries for manufacturing our raw materials; in restoring the American flag to the seas of the world; in extending our foreign trade; in opening and operating inland waterways; in irrigating or draining our millions of square miles of land now lying idle; in the development of Alaska, and the harnessing of our great mines of "white coal"—water-power.
Our foreign trade requires men of this type to travel in all parts of the world as commercial ambassadors, diligently collecting, compiling, and sending back to the United States information necessary in manufacturing goods for foreign consumption; also information regarding credits, prices, shipping, packing—in short, complete and detailed knowledge about commerce with foreign lands, how to secure it and how to hold it.
The world's greatest opportunities to-day, perhaps, lie within the grasp of the men of this active type. Instead of pioneering in exploration, as in former years, they are needed to pioneer in production. From the earliest history of the race, these restless men have been faring westward and ever westward, adding to the wealth and resources of humanity by opening up new lands. But the crest of the westward moving tide has now circumnavigated the globe, and the Far West meets the Far East on the Pacific Ocean. Here and there are comparatively small, neglected tracts of land still to be developed, but there are no longer great new empires, as in former days. The great welling sources of human life have not ceased to flow, even though the final boundaries of its spread have been reached. Population will continue to grow and its demands upon the resources of the earth to increase. The man who discovers a way to make a hundred bushels of wheat
grow on an acre of land where only twenty-five bushels grew before is as great a benefactor of the race as the discoverer of a continent. The invention of the electric light, the telephone, the automobile, the trolley car, and the aeroplane have added as much to the products and power of the race as the pioneering of thousands of square miles of fertile hills and plains. The man who can find a cheap and easy way to capture and hold nitrogen from the air will add more to the wealth of the race than all the discoverers of all the gold mines.
America needs to find efficient and profitable methods for manufacturing her own raw materials. Up to the present time, our exports have been coal, petroleum, steel rails, wheat, corn, oats, lumber, and other products which carry out of the country the riches of our soil. We have been exporting raw materials to foreign lands, where they have been refined and fabricated by brain and hand and returned to us at some five hundred to a thousand times the price we received for them. With the increase of population, we need to capitalize more and more the intelligence and skill of our people, and less and less the virgin resources of our lands. Ore beds, coal measures, copper, lead, gold and silver mines, forests, oil wells, and the fertility of our soils can all become exhausted. But the skill of our hands and the power of our intellects grow and increase and yield larger and larger returns the more they are called upon to produce.
The man of bone and muscle—the restless, active, pioneering, constructing man—would do well to consider these things before determining upon his vocation, and especially before entering upon any kind of non-productive work. The world has need of his particular talents and he should find his greatest happiness and greatest success in the exercise of them in response to that need.
We have seen so many men of this active type so badly placed that individual examples seem almost too commonplace for citation. Yet, a few may be instructive and encouraging.