Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/40

30 and improvements. But it can not be long, without a change of proprietors, the original ones dropping their title, and giving up the struggle to other lists of unfortunates.

There is no doubt but that the investments in these vampiric mortgages are good—that is, good for those who loan the money, and good also for those roving or stationary agents who make their commissions out of them, and who scour every Eastern town where money is to be had to put into this form of security. I am not blaming these negotiators. The money must be borrowed, and somebody must furnish it. But is it not pitiful that the one business in this world which seems nearest to man's primitive nature, without which no other could exist, and into which the moralist and the well-wisher of his species is ever ready to advise young men to go, should be the selected prey of the most destructive and cruel legislation that can be invented by the wit of man?

All over the statute-book, if there is a law made having any effect at all upon the farmer, it is with an almost malicious certainty—one might think, if he judged by its effects—made to operate against him. Is it a half-holiday, or several whole ones, that are enacted? The operation of them is not a help to, but is a draught against, the farmer. His cows and his crops, and Nature itself, to whose laws he is more than anybody else tied down, will not and can not accept their supposed advantage. His work must still go on; and these are only new stumbling-blocks in his way, which leave him shorn of his hired help, to pursue his tasks without the customary assistance. If an eight-hour law is enacted, its maleficence, not its advantage, falls on him. The milking-hour and the harvest will not be postponed in obedience to any legislature. So far as it makes the day's labor brief, so certainly it extends his own labor from twelve hours to fourteen.

Notice, too, how every tax system now uppermost puts the heavy end of its incidence on the farmer. In the State, county, and township allotment of fiscal burdens the tax is direct. It falls upon what can be seen and discovered with greatest weight. But it never fails to discover the farmer. His broad acres can not be hidden or sworn away; while his neighbor, rich in personal holdings, can cunningly suspend his own tax by evasion—and sometimes by an artful change or confusion of residence—so as to add his tax, too, to the tax of the beridden farmer.

But worse than all this is his relation to the national tax system, which exploits away his hard-earned profits, small in percentage, almost invisibly, and then adds abuse to injury by successfully persuading him that it exists for his supreme advantage. He pays for a paper, as likely as not, which tells him, and has been telling him for a generation or more, that the beneficent