“Let us go slowly”, Mr. Forest answered with a smile. “Let us first look into the agrarian question. Reformers of society have always met the greatest difficulty when they came across the farmers. Under communistic rule the country people have but very little love for the soil they are tilling because they know it is not theirs, that their toiling does not benefit them, and they feel that the city people are favored at their expense. If I had been asked at the end of the last century how I would treat the land question I would have advocated a law ordaining that no farmer should have more than forty acres of land. If any farmer had more at the time of the passing of the bill he could keep it during his lifetime, but he would be compelled to dispose of it in his last will, so that a single person should not receive more than forty acres. On a forty acre piece a farmer can make a fair living, and although the farmers were by no means prosperous in your days, yet there was still a fair prospect for the increase of the value of land by reason of the increase of the population, augmented as it was by immigration”.
“But how would you have proposed to stop overproduction by the farming population through which the agricultural interests were suffering in 1887?” I inquired.
“The National Bureau of Statistics would have served the farmers just as well as the rest of the people. The farmers should have formed state associations and should have laid out plans for the production according to the capacity of the farms. And, after ascertaining that their capacity of production was far ahead of consumption, they should have used the surplus of land for the production of new things that could, perhaps, find a market, or they could have saved their labor by not producing more goods than they could sell in supplying the real demands of the market, thus working less.”
“Under your plan every person would not have had a right to land”, I remarked.
“Yes, everybody would, who could pay the price the owner demanded for it”, Mr. Forest said. “Not everybody can own a farm. Did you own one?”
“I did not”.
“Very well. Under your communistic system nobody owns a piece of ground large enough to put a stick into”.
“How would you have regulated the professional services?”
“By passing laws establishing rates to be charged for professional services. And the laws I would have simplified by doing away with the abominable confusion resulting from the innumerable decisions forming precedents. For a long time I did not believe it until I found positive statements to the effect that a trading nation like the Americans, at the end of the nineteenth century, had neither a national criminal law, nor a national commerce law. This fact and the confusion caused by the conflicting precedent decisions that could always be quoted by either of the contesting lawyers in a suit must have made the United States, in your days, a paradise for swindlers and for lawyers who cared not so much for the upholding of the law, as for a retainer”.
“Such were the charges frequently made against the law and lawyers in my days”, I said. “But now tell me what you would have done with the railroad and telegraph employees, with—”