Page:Essays on the Social Problem.pdf/8

 long will the parasitic class continue to fatten on the industry of labor, and uphold their privileges by inciting one section of working men against another section, and arousing the war spirit within them.

Wealth producers! refuse to longer allow the foul fiend of war to urge you on to self-destruction: to cause you to slaughter one another in the interest of your common enemy. Refuse to fight!

Usually the farmer and his vocation are overlooked in the discussion of sociologic questions, or as it is called "the labor question," the city toiler and factory operative occupying the greater part, if not all, of the discussion. The farmer has been a dreaded and hated factor in economics by the old style Trade Unionist and advocate of "fair wages," and has stood so clearly out against the political sky as an individualist, that the State Socialists have instinctively recognized in him a great barrier to their schemes of governmentalizing everything.

The farmer loves his lands, his flocks and herds, or orchards and meadows, as the case may be, and does not take kindly to the idea of having his farm taken by the government, and his work laid out for him by a committee. On the other hand he knows when to plow and when to sow, when to harvest his wheat and when to shear sheep. Experience has taught him better than any book-learned professor could tell him.

Socialist editors of the De Leon type try to get rid of him by declaring that agriculture is becoming an industry and that the property-holding farmer will soon exist only in history. This satisfies the average farmer-hating city Social Democrat, who rejoices in the foreclosure of farm mortgages and points with sanguine assurance to the big bonanza farms in proof of his pet theories.

Meanwhile the farmer goes on feeding the world and is undergoing hardships and struggles such as he alone can know.

The farmer of America feels the pressure of "hard times" and is "squeezed" by combinations of railroads, elevators and commission merchants, as long as there is any wealth to squeeze from him. Unable to get cash for what he has to sell, he is compelled to mortgage his farm in order to get money to pay his taxes. The mortgage on his farm is a sure sign to the wise-acre political economist that he has been extravagant, and has not lived "within his means."

To the farmer the mortgage is a constant source of fear. It stands over him as a monster, taking away his produce as interest, and threatening to take from him his home; his acres, which have cost him many days of hard exhausting toil to clear and put in cultivation; his orchard, which he has planted and watched grow up and gladden the eyes of many with its yield of luscious fruit. And the farmer hates the mortgage that thus threatens him and desires above all things to be rid of it and retain his home.

Is it any wonder he takes up with the theory of currency inflation which promises to make it possible for him to pay off his indebtedness?

But currency inflation cannot bring him any permanent relief, and as State Socialism is the opposite of his way of thinking and mode of living, there is no school of thought so well calculated to attract his attention, nor one which he will so readily adopt, or adapt himself to, as Anarchism.

When the farmer understands that Anarchism proposes that he shall keep his farm as long as he likes, that it will never be sold for taxes, and that he will have no interest to pay or mortgage to meet in Anarchy, he very easily and quite readily takes up with Anarchist theories.

If Anarchism prevails he can retain his farm if he so desires, or, which is most probable, when he sees that co-operative effort is more desirable, he can unite his