ANOTHER PROSPECTIVE TRUST.
THE mania for city life, caused by the growing dislike of honest toil and a desire to live easier lives, is driving the farmers in many parts to seek more labor-saving machinery. A press item says that "a Kansas firm has commenced the manufacture of a farm auto-motor that will do the plowing and harvesting formerly requiring thirty-six to forty-eight horses and a score or more of men. It is expected that the harvesting problem will be solved by next year." Last year there was a great scarcity of harvest hands in various localities, altho there were many idle men in the cities and towns claiming to be seeking employment. The wonderful growth of mechanical invention is enabling a few men to cultivate large areas of land, and the growing dislike of men and women to farm life enables a few men to secure large tracts and so to monopolize the business that poor men with ordinary methods can not compete with them. It is said that the coming trust that will overshadow all others will be the farming trust. Everything seems to point that way, and to favor such a condition. When it comes, as it is likely to come, the men who make a business of forming and manipulating great combines will control the agricultural and horticultural industries of the country as they are doing in other lines. When the same ring of operators come to control the crops, the mines, the manufactories, the railroads, the banks, the steamship lines, the fuel and timber supplies, etc., the masses will then be at their mercy entirely. And we are almost there. While the majority of the population are looking here and there for easy wage positions, and openings in professional callings, their inheritances in the gifts of nature are fast slipping into the hands of the few men who are shrewd enough to grasp the advantage the possession of these things assures. No form of human government ever yet devised has been able to prevent the cunning and enterprising exploiters from getting hold of the patrimony of the indolent and careless itinerants—a class that seems to be increasing at an astonishing rate.