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work, and concentration on the same problems make the little-lands industrially a good deal like units of a large manufacturing plant.

Although the company has not received a high return on its investment, it considers Alderwood successful. Hugh McRae of Wilmington, North Carolina, whose ardent effort built up the three interesting settlements of Castle Hayne, Van Eden, and St. Helena, believes that "farmcities" present excellent possibilities for private capital. If the company takes the unearned increment, raising land prices as fast as possible to the settlers, doubtless the parent concern will make a profit. This has virtually been the policy at Alderwood, which is about the last word in this sort of scheme yet developed, minded to play fair with its people. Yet the ultimate success of the colonists depends upon the company stopping short of forced, speculative prices.

So-called colonization schemes in every part of the country have been tragically, criminally speculative. speculative. With no intention of training men or starting a specialized, standardized industry or promoting coöperative buying or marketing, exploiting promoters have demanded exorbitant land prices, have taken all the purchasers had, and left them to struggle on the bare land without capital. So generally have speculative values and bad practices prevailed that Dr. Elwood Mead, preeminent among landsettlement experts, now chief of the Reclamation Service, declares unequivocally, "For the man with little capital, state action is necessary."

He holds it is state or national business. We shall have two hundred millions of population by the end

of the century, statisticians predict. Adopting far-sighted land policy, we might prosperously maintain double that number. But this exodus of farmers, starved out socially and industrially, certainly shows that landminded men must have new guaranties, new organization, new facilities. Since the homesteads of our great national folk-land were exhausted, we have had no settlement policy. A wise new one is imperative. Other nations, like Germany, England, Australia, New Zealand, have spent hundreds of millions on the job of properly distributing and establishing their farm-minded people, and promoting the use of the land to the best purpose.

Private enterprise, however intelligent, is not enough. When a State undertakes such projects, it may wholly eliminate profit. "The ordinary business conception of the importance of the factors involved lays the heavy emphasis on PROFIT, PROPERTY, Man, Woman, child," points out Dr. Mead. "The state sees them in reverse order, CHILD, WOMAN, MAN, Property, profit."

The State can borrow the essential large sums at low interest. It can buy large tracts at non-speculative prices. It can do engineering, draining, or irrigation at cost. From its agricultural colleges experts on soil, farmstead, coöperation, or credit may be called in.

From Alderwood I went down to see how California had done this. With her millions of acres of unsettled irrigated land held at inflated speculative values, with her immigration problems and increasing tenancy, it was plain to see why California had been willing to try out New Zealand's farm colony

plan, which Dr. Mead had helped put into effect. In 1917 the legislature created a Land Settlement Commission, appropriated a million and a quarter, and authorized an issue of ten million four-per-cent. bonds. A flaw in the law prevented the bond issue, but with the original funds two farm colonies (Durham and Delhi) were built. Durham calls to mind great clouds of golden butterflies on a golden day in the empire of the Sacramento Valley. Brilliant-winged, a pageant in themselves, they turned off marvelous aërial figures with their monoplane bodies. Perhaps butterfly forage was not so abundant before the colony came. They seemed to celebrate the wonderful prune orchards, handsome fields of alfalfa, meadows rustling with sturdy Kaffir corn, and browsing herds of high-bred cattle.

The commission purchased 6200 acres from the Leland Stanford estate. Formerly the land, used as hog pasture, supported one family and a bunk-house. Six years later 5000 acres are under intensive cultivation by one hundred and sixty farmers and their families. A fine community has grown up, not like Topsy, but like a book baby. It has a logical center, where the fine dairy stands, a school, a park for fairs and picnics. Attractive homes are situated not all by the roadside, but fairly close to the center of each farm. Here also specialists paved the way for good work and prosperity. Soil experts, surveyors who contoured the surface for irrigation-ditches, engineers who prepared the land for irrigation by leveling and throwing up borders, and farmstead planners who shaped out tracts of sizes varying from two to three hundred acres, preceded the settlers.

The commission considered most important the selection of the actual farmers. It advertised. Land-hungry souls applied from every quarter. No pains were spared to secure information concerning the fitness and training and financial status of aspirants. Only the fit and the farm-wise were acceptable. Land-born or landtrained people, earnestly intent on farm life, energetic, and healthy were chosen. Every applicant was required to have five per cent. of the cost of the land and at least $1500 cash besides. Trained farm laborers needed only $50 to secure a two-acre plot.

The settlers inspected their land, consulted with the farmstead engineer about house, buildings, equipment, and the farm plans. The state architect sent a staff man to Durham. Materials were bought in carload lots. A hundred farms were improved, and houses were built at the lowest cost and with excellent results.

The satisfaction of the settlers themselves is patent. Talk to a half dozen, you will find they count themselves lucky. For they are landmen to whom ownership would have been impossible without this leg up. When they arrived on their land they found certain fencing done, and here and there a field planted. A superintendent was stationed to give information and agricultural advice. To this able person, Mr. Kreutzer, to his tact, and to adequate suggestions concerning the settlers' problems, much of Durham's immediate success is doubtless due. He was the community organizer. He made collections. He was the banker for the commission. The State lends a maximum $3000 to each settler. The superintendent must approve every loan applied for.

When a farmer comes in and blurts out, "I want to make a touch," he must declare the purpose for which he wants the money. While talking over the advisability of the loan and the terms of repayment, the superintendent has opportunity to give any essential business advice.

Farmers are diffident about applying for credit. One settler, a good enough man, became discouraged. On the excuse of going to Sacramento "to buy a tractor" he took several unwarranted vacations.

The man's wife consulted the superintendent. Together they conspired "to fix him so he would have his feet under his own dining-table three times a day." When he returned, they showed him it would be profitable to buy some good cows, and that he could by using his credit. He had to be taught how to use his borrowing power for proper productive purposes.

The first week his check from the dairy was $47.21, enough to meet all his payments and leave the wife $5 to get what she needed at the store. No more trouble with him. Yet without the superintendent's well judged human engineering and available funds, that man might have slipped into failure.

"A Pennsylvanian, an Ohioan, a naturalized Korean, a wanderer who had lived in thirty-two States"-so runs the tale as you pass the houses. A Nebraskan brought his family across the Rockies in their own car, camping by the roadside. His house was tiny, but when they had lived in Durham only a year he had added substantially to his assets, reckoning them at $12,000. Proudly, he displayed a wonderful herd. He could hardly wait, he said, till he owned thirty cows.

Then he would be justified in buying an automatic milker.

"All he can think of is cows, alfalfa, gyp corn, and melons," whispered the wife. "He did n't want me to have turkeys or chickens. But I've got the chickens, anyhow. See."

The vexed national issue of egg money will turn up in paradise. Her determination recalled the pioneer women of other days.

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One of the first mutual ventures of the excellent, active, neighborly families was to select one breed of cows, hogs, sheep, for the community. They later formed the Coöporative Stockbreeders', Hog-breeders', Water-users, Cold-storage, and Creamery associations. The last two have good plants. Up and down the valley Durham coöperative milk has the finest of reputations. Its market is steady. Several farmers with good dairy herds have a gross income of more than $3000.

The office of the commission stands near a historic grove. Once there was a bull-ring near by. Now ambitious farmers, from three to five together, own high-bred bulls of their own for breeding purposes. Robbers were hung from the sycamores in the golddigger era. To-day good neighbors join coöperative associations to increase their neighbors' incomes at the same time as their own. An exciting legend of hidden treasure goes with the property. All these years the treasure has been there in the soil, but it took agricultural colonists, not getrich-quick romanticists, to find it by skill laboriously applied.

Dr. Mead maintains that "souls are uncovered on the land." Take the

case of Nielsen. Once seen, you would never forget his trim little holding, with its modern cottage supplemented by a wonderful outdoor room whose walls are formed by a mammoth grapevine depending gracefully from high branches of a great tree. EveryEverything about his place bespeaks thrift, from the pumpkins, which make useful every inch of the banks of the irrigation ditch, to Billy, the ram, and the ewes which eat the waste and offer sheer profit in lambs and wool.

Upon Nielsen first fell the duty of enforcing the coöperative society's rule about tubercular cattle. Periodical tests are made. A farmer is allowed thirty days to dispose of a diseased animal. Nielsen appeared on the thirty-first without fail. If the cow was still there, the farmer's milk was excluded from the dairy. And when Nielsen, acting on a committee for the coöperative, might have purchased for himself alone a fine-bred bull, he deliberately put aside the temptation because the breeding society needed it. That sort of spirit communicates itself. It is not uncommon at Durham. A settler's barn was destroyed by fire. All the neighbors turned to and rebuilt it.

narrow to-day, yet it is wider in this sort of place than elsewhere. And in the laboratory here and at Delhi many interesting advances are being made. Take the school truck of hearty children, a cheerful sight as it rumbles along a Durham road. Progeny of farmholder and farm-hand are on precisely the same footing. Dr. Mead believes that one of the greatest contributions Durham and Delhi have made is their success in developing a method to secure and hold skilled farm labor.

The old type of hired man is as scarce as the one-time "faithful," enslaved house-servant, and for much the same reasons. No comfort, leisure, social recognition, or future existed for them. A succession of itinerant workers following the crops, rebellious and ill trained, took John Farm-Hand's place. Yet dependable skilled labor is as essential to proper farming as to other industries.

Twenty-six tiny, though decidedly pretty, farm-workers' allotments at Durham were offered to men without capital, but with training and determination. Only one out of the number failed to make good. Employment was steady at four dollars a day, minimum. To sit in the clean, comfortable living-room of one of the charming cottages and hear from a proud little wife the story of her man's success confirms the suspicion that the farm-labor problem is solved when farmers jointly apply to their relationships with hired hands the same principles manufacturers now apply to factory hands.

The land flows not only with milk, but with watermelons and Casabas as sweet as honey. One settler, raised on a farm, but all his adult life till now a motorman, maintains in season a watermelon canteen. For a penny a pound you can eat all you can hold, but every seed on your plate you must save. He has a specialty of his own, a seed contract for a dollar a pound. One farm laborer who had only His melons have taken a number of twenty dollars to pay down on his plot prizes at the annual fairs held in the when he came, found work at first as Durham park. a painter at seven dollars a day. He The farmer's road to prosperity is had enough land to grow a splendid

garden, which fed his family, and there was pasture for two cows. He kept books that show he earned from his labor and land in fifteen months $2165. His children had a home they were proud of, went to a fine school, and had real playmates. Friends were at hand for his wife. For himself, during the open season, there was always a deer hunt in the inviting hills close at hand, and the future held every prospect that he might graduate into the class of larger landholders. These families were socially included, not half outcast.

Unlike Durham in climate and soil, Delhi is not different in spirit, vitality, or results. Its houses suggest the adobe of the desert. Among its settlers are ex-service men with a farm background. The settlers here were able to earn cash in the plant which the commission found it economical to set up to make irrigation pipe for the area. Their chief businesses are chicken farming and vineyards.

Both colonies are past the experimental stage and are thoroughly solvent. Homesteaders have thirty-six and a half years in which to pay off completely. They get title in ten years. Deficiencies have been negligible, and, if never made up, would be more than equalized by added improvements.

Perhaps the active propaganda against "retail" farming is to the interest of farm-implement makers with products too expensive for ordinary small farmers to buy. Wholesale farming is urged. Provided that neither land-love nor mass intelligence is lost, larger units have great advantages. At Durham, Delhi, and Alderwood the real unit is the colony, not the small holding. On well consid

ered plans from one hundred to one thousand farmers specialize together and delegate certain important functions of all to selected members. In this way they deal economically with difficulties that only great ranchers have been prepared to meet. Coöperating, these little-landers may produce scientifically, better output, lessen waste. They may save in buying, gain in selling, promote good living, and consumers are better off. By teamwork they approach and may one day realize the necessary reorganization of the farming game.

If we do not ourselves provide wisely for our land hungry, other countries will get them. Count the Americans in the Canadian Northwest. The Canadian Pacific has a very creditable land settlement policy, and boasts interesting farm-villages in the Bow River District.

We need to keep our own. Dr. Mead and F. H. Newell, former chief of the Reclamation Service, have both made nation-wide investigations. They emphasize the urgency of modern land-settlement policies. The late Franklin K. Lane strongly advocated the adoption of colonization plans of the California type as a post-war program for land-wise soldiers. The East as well as the West demands development. New England, Virginia, and the South Atlantic seaboard have their own peculiar conditions to be met. Millions of acres in our coastal areas should be drained and peopled. In the Northwest certain great unsuccessful irrigation projects, for example in Wyoming, need human reclamation, with appropriate state encouragement, to be turned into successes. In the Southwest the vast basin of the Colorado calls for an army of land-wise.

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