| Show written arnt for tug raw paper NORTON MORTON ON THE FARMER copyrighted by frank 0 Oa carpenter menter 1865 CALLED on an the hon J sterling morton the secretary of agriculture last night and asked him to give me S some 0 M e points for the cities which are turning their vacant lots into potato gardens for the poor the secretary of agriculture believes that there is money in farming he is a man of much wealth and a great part of his fortune has come out of the soil he is highly cultured and college bred but he is as plain in his ways as was abraham lincoln and he has practical ideas ol of men and things like he has a story t to illustrate ohis his overy point and like lincoln he i is s more of an optimist than a pessimist he thinks that the farmers ot of the united states have as good business chances as the members of any other profession and he says that those who mix their manure with brains seldom tail to amass wealth he has of late been making a study of the condition of the farmer and of his possibilities bili ties outside of the old lines of cultivation and he is full of new suggestions he is a great advocate of small farms and he tells me there is a good deal of money to be made in potatoes MONEY IN POTATOES said the secretary there is no no doubt but that there will be a large demand for all the potatoes that these cities will raise this year and for years to come we raised last year more than bushels of potatoes in OP th united states and these brought about the crop was however not enough by millions of bushels t to supply our demand and potatoes always bring a high price this is especially alliso 0 o in the cities citie sand and it i these people will work there mere bisno is no doubt but that they can make some money out of their the great I 1 have authol au thod being employed is that tai je the lana ia given n to the poor for homing no 69 it to be rep rented ted to lo them t leu Z 04 at a very verv low low rate rati and you yau would then find ten men engAge engaged dm in the cultivation au orthe soil where one is I 1 is doing it now people want what they tb can get for nothing and measures like this tend to the education eau cation of paupers haupers pau pers I 1 THE HOMESTEAD ACT it is a good deal like the homestead act secretary morton went on that was one of the worst things for the farmers of this country that has ever baRp happened ened to them it encouraged pauperism and fraud before the horne hodie stead act was passed you could preempt a quarter section of land and by paying a small price for it you could get a title to it the result was that no one took the poor lands and the man who was a farmer had to be thrifty and intelligent tell igent to succeed the homestead act gave the land for nothing and many of those who took advantage of it were lazy ignorant and thriftless some settled on lands for the mere inere purpose of selling them as soon as they had secured their titles others tb ers proved up their lands paid the dollar and a quarter an acre which the government demanded and then mortgaged them to the fullest extent and skipped out after living on the land for a short time they could get a title for a quarter section upon the payment of the money lenders were accustomed cus tomed to loan at least upon n a quarter section and this gave the mortgager soo clear profit thousands oi of acres ot of land which was utterly worthless were proved up in order to get these mortgages the owners left as soon as they had bad obtained the money and the eastern men who furnished the funds had no assets but a lot of sand hills bills to show for them they paid the loan agent 2 per cent for making the loan and required no security the agents worked for their commission and not for their employers and the result is that there are thousands of mortgages in kansas and nebraska today which are not net worth the paper on which they are Wk written itten I 1 have traveled over much of that mortgaged land I 1 remember one farm in which a plow stood in the desert near neara a shanty and upon it the farmer had hung a card which read take rake the damn plow tool too in another part ot of the sand hills where the WWI oil was miter miserably ably poor I 1 saw a shanty on wheels wheel sf I 1 asked my driver who could pbs possibly sibly live there and who would be fool enough to take up such land as that he replied that all the land we could see had been entered and proved sud that that house was wheeled from place to place and that one man alter after another had lived in it for a short time in order to swear that he had had a house on his land As soon as they got any evidence oi of a future title they hey borrowed the from the agent paid this to the government and then took tor for a mortgage on the quarter section representing 1 I do not mean to say that many of those who took advantage of the homestead a act ct were not honest men and good farmers but the principle was bad and it encouraged pauperism and fraud it if for instance a rent could be charged for these jagt ot A equal cosay say one ieh of their annual taxes a mere nominal price the people ga av 1 ealizhe that they were vitre paying for them and would pot lose their self respect MONEY IN FARMING you say bay there is monley money in farming mr secretary said 1 I the general idea is that the farmers are going to ruin they are rushing to the cities and they the y i are complaining all over the coun country try how is this it is not half as bad as it is painted df said the secretary the farmers are maki making ing as much money as any other people in the united states they dont make as much as they formerly did no business is doing that why we used to getten get ten per cent for money out west on gilt edged security I 1 have paid twelve per cent myself mortgaging the best of real estate to get it and have made money out of it you can not borrow all the ibe money you want for six per cent the people are now contented with small profits it is the same in in the mercantile business the storekeepers used to growl when their profits were less than twenty five per cent they are now glad to get eight per cent the truth is that the farmers profits have fallen the least and failures are proportionately less among them than among any other class of business men inen take this matter of mortgaged farms these farmers are doing business on borrowed capital and now and then one of them fails the majority of merchants do their business the same way and ninety per cent fail at some time in their lives I 1 believe the percentage of failures in the dry goods business I 1 is fully as high as ninety seven per cent cent the majority of the farmers succeed they pay their expenses and in the end own their farms FOREIGN MARKETS FOR THE FARMER the trouble with many of our farmers continued secretary morton is that they are too apt to put all their eggs into one basket they do not diversity diversify their crop and the failure of a single staple causes the ruin of 0 the whole section there is a vast market for the american farmer in foreign lands which has not yet been touched we must study the wants of the people abroad and raise food for them this is the chief work ot of the agricultural department today I 1 am having our consuls and ministers all over the world investigate the markets for american goods and it is is surprising what a variety of valuable information they are sending in to us we mient send millions of do dollars j lars worth of food products to england yearly take the matter ot of eggs england is now importing more than ahan worth every year the little country of belgium crowded as it is se Is worth of eggs for british stomachs and france gets 7 a year out af the e eggs s which she supplies to john bull mith with our vast area and our so called starving farmers we alo do not raise enough eggs tor for ourselves we import them by the millions and the cackling of tens of thousands of canadian hens is heard daily over the eggs which they are laying for the united states eggs are beneath the notice of the average american farmer his wife may perhaps perhaps get a bit of her pin money out 0 of the chickens but that is all we import it a great quantity of cabbages and we buy fruit and nuts which we might raise ourselves to the extent of millions of dollars A a year we are shipping hi ins more butter every year atit ve 17 new zealand and australia are crowd angus ink us in this lije efte they oe ae a e sell siding ding vast quantities to england and selling se lin 9 it there fora for a shilling it a pound within four years the consumption idis of butter in england has risen and the australian export has increased nearly ff during this time many parts of our southern southern states are now raising dairy products products and in n east tennessee the chicken and the eggs last year brought in more money than all alethe the wheat POINTS POINT ON MOOS HOGS how about meat mr secretary Is not that market well cared lor for no replied mr morton the meat market is not half worked we ship great quantities to europe but we do not get the best prices take our bacon it b brings rm As nine cents a pound in england the danish anish bacon sells for fourteen cents a pound and the famous wilkshire bacon ba con is worth eighteen cents a pound had we gotten the best prices our bacon would have been worth nearly ten million dollars more to us than it was last year the english like a lean bacon and packers there buy hogs according to the thickness of the fat upon their backs A hog that has fat two and one fourth inches thick brings a shilling more per twenty pounds of its weight than a hog whose fat on the back is three inches thick the english want lean swine they will not buy any hogs th that a t weigh more than pounds as they know that bacon from such hogs is ia not in demand here our ambition is to raise fat hogs and I 1 have seen car loads of swine which will average pounds in weight still we have a great trade in farm products with england full half of all our foreign exports go there we send more than tons of hay and more than 30 tons of cheese to great britain every year we send only 2000 tons of butter and denmark beats us in this article alone by tons yearly MACHINE FARMERS the trouble with us the secretary of agriculture continued is that we are too luxurious in our methods we have been making money so easily that we cant appreciate the change in conditions the world over and we have not tried to adapt ourselves to them our farmers are machine farmers they raise practically nothing that cannot be raised by machinery take the matter of wheat the farmer now rides the plow ashe as he breaks the soil he rides as he he harrows and he plants his fields with a sulky sulky drill the crop comes up of it itself if and when it is ripe the farmer again takes a ride on a reaping machine with an umbrella over his head and when he is finished the machine has cut and bound his grain A steam engine does his thrashing and a small part of the straw forms the fuel which makes the steam all this is expensive and if the wheat brings a low price or there is a crop failure the farmer runs behind he does not watch the small leaks and he does not raise the little things which pay so well take the onion crop onions always bring a high price here and it pays to raise them we import vast quantities and the american farmer lets the outsiders have the profit it is so all over the country the farmer of the south sticks to his cotton and tobacco and he of the north and west to his wheat and corn FARMERS what do you think atthe of the gayour way our farmers uve live mr Sec secretary I 1 asked keda 41 would it not be better if il they lived lived la in villager village and not on their far farms nis in many respects yes was the reply the farmers fan ners wife has a dreary tot lot she is in most cases little better than a slave to her work and her house she drags out a sad existence scrubbing and cooking with f few resources outside of herself I 1 cant imagine anything much worse than her condition and it seems to the me that the european system of farm villages is better than ours and still thi the most of our farm era ars wives are bright women they it are re as a rule industrious and good business women but they chiy get little for it I 1 believe in making women to a large extent the business partners ot of their husbands they are not so in the case of most men take for instance a story I 1 heard beard the ahe other day dai about the family of an old farmer in Ind indiana fana the man and his wife had lived together for fifty years their children had grown up and left them and now at seventy the larmer found the burderi of df his work too much for ifor him and he decided to sell the farm and live off ot of the interest it was worth but when the deed came to be made the farmers wife objected she said she had helped to pay tor for the farm she had worked all her life for it and she was bound to have some of the money coney which it brought before she signed the deed the lawyer and the husband were dumfounded dum founded they had not anticipated such a complication and at last one of them asked the old lady liow bow much she thought she ought to bave she hesitated a moment and then said she believed she was really entitled to ask for as much as 2 of course she got it but think how little money she must have had in the past to have made such a fuss about this 11 amount HOW ONE RICH FARMER HIS WIPE WIFE 1 I am surprised how mean men are sometimes to their wives continued secretary morton not only farmers but other men as well woman is naturally a sell self sacrificing creature and she submits to many a thing a man would not think of tolerating tole raving speak bog of little mean nesses let me give you an all ig instance stance that I 1 saw myself during the bays da y s of the war I 1 happened to be in a store in hi my town one day when an old fellow whom I 1 will call jones ones came calne in with his wife to buy some goods this than nan jones ones came from one of the most celebrated families in the united states kie he settled in nebraska when it was still a territory and by economy and thrift he had now gotten a farm of something like 1000 acres he was known ato have muney money in the bank and was considered wealthy well shortly after he entered the stoie mrs jones took up a 9 piece ol of calico and admired it very much As she looked at it she said to ter husband pa I 1 ought to have a new dress and 1 1 I like this very much dont you think we could afford to buy it on oh I 1 suppose so replied the old man and he thereupon asked the clerk the price pime helas he was told it was 50 50 cents a yard old mr jones raised his eyes at thi this and asked nis wife how much it would take she replied she she could get along on less than twelve yards and he answered why ma twelve yards ot of that goods at 50 cents a yard would woud cost 6 now dont you think that that is pretty hith high I 1 I 1 yes she replied 1 I do but 1 need the dress well said the old man times are hard and I 1 do wis wish hyou you could get along without it just juat now you yes I 1 suppose I 1 could replied the old lady with a sigh and the calico was dropped A moment later old mr jones asked the same clerk if he had any tobacco and whether he had any of that good old virginia leaf chica they used to ta keep in stock the clerk said yes we have but its awful high its 2 a pound and I 1 think it will go higher before it gets less we have just one caddy left you think it will go higher replied jones yes said the clerk its sure to go up well you might put me up five pounds said the old man and a moment later I 1 saw him carrying it out of the store he had not 6 to spend for his wiles calico dress but he thought nothing of putting to 10 into plug tobacco anis is is a sample of the kind of treatment some wives are receiving every day I 1 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