OCR Text |
Show GOVERNMENT TO PLACE MEN ON FARMS There has been considerable discussion of the project of the government to put people back on the farm and thereby there-by decentralize .populations in big cities. The main theory is to get people who are working in manufacturing or other business of the cities to live on small plats of land where it would be possible for them to grow a part of their food. In this way it would be possible for them to get by with the less wages that men will have to take with the shorter hours that of necessity will be a part of the future. Too many students of life this seems like a way to happiness hap-piness and contentment. "A little land well tilled, nine bean rows and a hive for the honey bee," is the way a poet has expressed ex-pressed it. It has been pointed out a thousand times that the most-to-be-pitied object on the face of the earth is the city dwelled who is a slave to factories and smokestacks, depending solely on the whims of fortune for his bread and butter. A poor man at the mercy of masters. That history will repeat itself is a well-known fact to those who have studied the records of the past. They recall the dim dusty past and the fate that befell so many civilizations civili-zations of ancient times. Nineveh and Tyre, Greece, Rome and Babylon all gone and buried deep in mud. They were nations of cities, and cities spelled their ruin. Their peoples flocked to the white lights and the stone sidewalks. And masters more cunning than they hog-tied and hamstrung them. Then the foolish masters themselves perished with all that their greed "riact amassed. The plaint of the city slave has been that he had not the money with which to obtain land and thus make himself secure. se-cure. Now, it appears, the government of the United States is to make answer to that plaint. The government will put the slave on the land and then he will be a slave no longer, gut a free and independent man walking serene in the sun with the dignity of life to restore his lost pride. |