Let us then consider first the general course of rural civilisation in the great food-producing tract of the Middle West. I have in my mind the portion I know best, the last-settled part of the corn belt. Thirty years ago I saw something of the newcomers who settled in this section, where there was still much raw land. These settlers, knowing that the land must rise rapidly in value, almost invariably purchased much larger farms than they could handle. They often sank their available working capital in making the first payments for their land, and went heavily into debt for the balance. They became "land poor," and, in order to meet the instalments of purchase and the high interest on their mortgages, they invented a system of farming unprecedented in its wastefulness. The farm was treated as a mine, or, to use Mr. James J. Hill's metaphor, as a bank where the depositors are always taking out more than they put in. A corn crop, year after year, without rotation or fertilisers, satisfied the new conception of husbandry--the easiest and least costly extraction of the wealth in the soil. Land, labour, capital, and ability I had been taught to regard as the essentials of production; but here capital was reduced to the minimum, and ability left to nature. Many of the young men who took Horace Greeley's advice and went West knew nothing about farming. I remember writing home that I was in a country where the rolling stone gathered most moss. Possibly the method adopted was the quickest way to get rich; living on capital is all right provided somebody will replace the squandered resources. While there were ample unoccupied lands, Uncle Sam looked kindly upon these enterprising pioneers. It was only in the second Roosevelt Administration that it dawned upon the national conscience that the nation had some claim to be considered as well as the individual. Of course all this is changed now; although I am not sure that western Canada is not being educated in soil exhaustion by some of these extemporised husbandmen whose habits and temperament lead them to seek "fresh fields and pastures new." "We are not out here for our health," was the reply I got when I showed that my old-fashioned economic sense was shocked by this substitution of land speculation for farming.