Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/191

Rh is there any way to apply this remedy if it were an effectual one.

Again—to refer to the farmer once more—the land of a farm well tilled is not only now thoroughly mixed with the farmer's toil and skill in the improvement of its constituents, but it is covered with buildings, fences, ditches for drainage, and wells, that represent his hard-earned labor or his free capital applied to it. Can he get its whole value back when his estate is settled, or if he wishes to retire or remove? Very rarely—almost never, in fact. Other business plants that have been well handled usually sell out at a profit, more or less. But the farm goes off at the sacrifice of an "earned decrease." Two farms within a half-day's ride of the place where I am writing, in one of the best soiled and best settled counties in the State of New York, have lately been sold (not under legal constraint) for less than half what they and their improvements originally cost, involving losses respectively of from eight to ten thousand dollars. And this is not a strange or infrequent thing. It, or something like it, is one of the commonest of modern occurrences. But do we hear any school of philosophers agitated about these losses? Society, in some way, has unbuilt or leveled their value by just as responsible doings as it has by worthy and rewardable doings built up the city lot.

If it is to have the fat meat in its pudding, on what principle can it free itself from responsibility for the lean? Can society or the state play at seesaw with the owners of land? Can it say, "Heads I win and tails you lose," and ever undertake hereafter to talk about right and virtue and honesty? If it should ever hanker after the "unearned increment," there should go with it when it is passed over an accounting for the "earned decrease."

That this is not a small matter, a reference to the New England "hill-farms," so called, will amply show. In hundreds of towns there, from which the population has withdrawn itself to aggrandize certain factory towns, or to develop the West, the whole farming area has met with an irremediable loss. Farms can be bought for far less there than their surface improvements alone cost. A friend of mine bought a productive farm of one hundred and sixty acres in Massachusetts a few years ago, with a good house, barn, and other fixtures upon it—and he did not pay the price that the barn alone cost! Purchases of farms at a similar advantage can be made to any extent in New England, not far from pleasant country villages and near railroads, and there is no place in Massachusetts that is over twelve miles from a railroad. This means getting the land itself for less than nothing, which is on better terms than Henry George's creed calls for. In addition to his land, my friend had the house and fences, and some other things, thrown in. And yet the millennium