Page:Oscar Ameringer - Socialism for the Farmer (1912).djvu/24



In 1896 six foreign land companies owned twenty-six million acres-of this country, or enough to give 140,000 homesteads of 160 acres each. Cutting the homesteads down to eighty acres each, this land would support a farming population of 1,400,000 souls.

Some patriotic souls are bitterly opposed to alien ownership of land, but, to save my soul, I cannot see what difference it makes whether the rack-rent-ridden tenant pays his sweat-stained sheckels to the agent of my Lord Tweedledeedle in St. Louis or to Lawyer Skinnem at the nearest county seat.

If a boy puts a tack on my chair and I sit on it, I am not going to lick the boy because he is Dutch or Irish, but because he put the tack under me. It is not the nationality of the boy that hurts, but the tack, and so it is with landlordism.

The native land hog has been not less enterprising than the foreign breed, and it seems that our homemade trusts have dabbled considerably in the real estate business on the side.

Here are a few trust landlords:

Then there a number of thrifty and frugal individuals, who worked hard and saved still harder, until they acquired farms of such goodly proportions as that one of the late D. C. Murphy of New York, who left 4,000,000 acres of land behind; former United States Senator Farwell of Illinois, who owned 3,000,000; and Henry Miller of California, who to-day is the undisputed lord over 22,500 square miles.

Yes, this is the richest country on earth, and there is enough land for ten times the population we have, but it happens to belong to the fellow who farms the farmer instead of the farmer who farms the farm. There is plenty of air for everybody and some to spare, but if air could be bottled, frozen, packed or monopolized, some captain of industry would choke little meters down our throats and make us cough up a quarter for a day’s breathing. And he should not be blamed for it, either, because it is our duty to encourage brain, ability, foresightedness, enterprise and sagacity. Besides, a people who are willing to pay others for the use of God's earth should have no objection to putting up good money for God's air also.