Cure for Agrarianism by San Francisco Bulletin

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Oct 2, 1879

Cure for Agrarianism.

By San Francisco Bulletin

EVERY now and then some red-mouthed ranter roars out that land monopoly is the prime cause of all the evils which the community is suffering. Now the fact is the evil lies further back than this. It is the vagrant disposition of men who don't want land—who would not have it as a gift, if they were obliged to live upon it and become sober and industrious citizens. The danger to society to-day is in a large nomad class, men who are without responsibility, without fixed habits of industry, and who aspire to nothing so much as to plunder their more prosperous neighbors. This is the thriftless class who do not quite make ends meet. And when they fail in this respect, clamor for a division of property, and for the reconstruction of society. The fact is there can be no organized society so beneficent in its character that men of this class can prosper. The revolution wanted is right down among men who have no habits of self-denial, or thrift, economy and order. The first steps which a majority of such men take, is generally in a political direction. They step up as reformers, or train under the banner of some leader who promises reform, or what, in his view, is the same thing, the disruption of society.

When one has been brought into such close relations to the soil that he is obliged to cultivate it and to get his living directly from it, he ceases to make mischief in the community. If Kearney, Wellock, and Knight would each take themselves off to a piece of Government land, occupying it as a free gift, they would benefit themselves and greatly benefit the community. They might become leaders in the new role—apostles of a land-holding exodus. Why not lead out ten or fifteen thousand sand-lot men to these Government lands which are offered as free gifts to the landless. It requires money to agitate. It would hardly require more to take up a considerable number of farms and cultivate them. Some years ago attention was called to the "earth cure," the application of dry earth to fresh wounds and old sores. Earth is good as a deodorizer, and good as a healer of many hurts. What is wanted is the earth remedy applied to these chronic agitators.

There are millions of acres of land waiting for occupants. The Government offers to give the land. Here are ten thousand people, more or less, who are landless, and think in some way society has dealt wrongly by them. They look for a reconstruction, for a breaking down of old boundaries, for a "new deal," involving, as near as may be, an equal division of property, for the spoliation of the prosperous to help out the thriftless. It will never come. But while the delusion lasts these men will be landless victims, fruitlessly waiting for better times. What is wanted is missionary work accomplished by rough secular and muscular missionaries, who will go among these chronic agitators and make them land hungry—not for land plunder from others, but for the land which the government freely offers to every head of a family who is landless. That would be a reform worth having. When you have turned a street bummer or a sand-lot enthusiast into a land owner, he is a reformed man. But by what miracle can such a reform be accomplished?—San Francisco Bulletin.