Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 18.djvu/298

 and new uses lies not within the present population. If the successors of the pioneer had his push and hardihood something might be expected from them; but they have only his stubborn bias toward an intense individualism. They decline the enterprise that calls for coöperative effort, and will not yield to the steady grind of systematic industry. They are not a lazy people, for they are capable of prodigies of energy when it suits their mood; but they are an undisciplined people. The country stagnates in their hands because they will not do the things essential to its thrift and progress. This is not said in the spirit of fault-finding. The Oregonian is not among those who sneer at the pioneer spirit. It thinks it knows the Willamette people as well and possibly better than they know themselves; and it dares say without mincing words what it conceives to be the truth in explanation of why the country does not attract new population, and why it lags in the general movement of industrial progress.

There is land to be had in the Willamette Valley in great bodies and at small price. It would be worth the while of the Southern Pacific Railroad, since it has a great invested stake in the valley, to buy up a whole district and repeople it with a view to an experiment in industrial regeneration. It would be interesting and, we believe, vastly profitable, if there could be set in the heart of this dormant country a community of strictly modern farmers, large enough to organize the industries and to maintain the coöperative spirit of systematic agriculture. Such a community would be very useful to the country as an object lesson; and of especial service in assisting the organization of other and similar communities. We know of no better locality for such an effort than that of Southern Yamhill and Northern Polk, named in a recent writing in these columns, where a syndicate operator finds that 40,000 acres of choice and improved farm lands can be bought for a price averaging less than twenty dollars an acre.

Exploitation is what the Willamette Valley needs. It lacks no gift of nature fitting it for the home of thrift and fortune.