Page:Oscar Ameringer - Socialism for the Farmer (1912).djvu/20

 to the flour mill and have it ground, and if his wife hasn't forgotten how to bake, he may eat the bread. But raw cotton, cannot be worn, eaten, or used as fuel; therefore no other class of farmers are more dependent upon the capitalist class than the cotton raiser.

It is claimed that the cotton raisers suffer greatly from the hook worm, but it is hard to believe that even a hook worm can make a living out of the cotton raiser after the capitalists get through with him.

Suppose you own a fiddle and I own the bow. How much music will you make? Suppose you own the well and I own the pump. How much water can you get? Even a free owned farm with all its implements, animals and machines form only the first link in a long chain of production. Those who own the other links between the farmer and the consumer determine the wages and the mode of living of the farmer as effectively as the owner of the factory determines the wages of his employes.

But not all the farmers own even the first link of this chain. The farm land itself is gradually slipping away from the farmer. It may be well for some people to point to the automobiles and carriages as sure signs of prosperity among the farmers, but as long as it can be shown that the farmer is losing the very foundation on which he rests; if it can be shown that mother earth itself is becoming capitalist property—that is, a means of exploitation—then all this prosperity talk is idle wind. A farmer without land is a good deal like a fish without water, and so it may be well to give a little study to the land question.

The private ownership of land has been condemned by every thinker and prophet from Moses to Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx and Henry George. Even God has declared himself in favor of the common ownership of land when he said: "You are strangers and sojourners on this earth. And the land shall not be sold forever, for the land is mine." For many centuries the Jews heeded the divine injunction and divided the land every fiftieth year among the children of Israel. But in the course of time real estate agents and land boomers settled among them. The common land of God's children became the private property of the few, and the many found themselves landless. Thereupon God waxed wroth, as they used to say when a person got huffy, and he said to his chosen people, "Woe unto you, for you have built house on