I should have suspected a land-boomer in the doctor had there been anything aggressive or boastful in his manner, but he was speaking with the simple directness of one who knows and who needs no bluster to disguise ignorance or an ulterior motive.
I was deeply interested, and presently remarked that, coming as I did from the East, the demand for labor on the Western farms had been a surprise to me, and that I was sure that what he was telling me would sound strange to Eastern men, whose preconceptions of agrarian conditions at the West are formed largely from the representations of certain political parties which are recruited from the farming classes.
Dr. Brooks smiled indulgently, and kept his eyes straight ahead while he answered me.
“If you stay out here long enough,” he said, “you’ll find that there are two kinds of farmers in the West. There is one kind that know their business and that are farmers, and there’s another kind that are a good deal more interested in politics than they are in farming. You can put it down as a pretty safe rule that the farmers who have the best knowledge of their business and who are the most industrious and frugal and economical are the least dissatisfied with their conditions and the least anxious to change them by political action, while the more inefficient and shiftless and thriftless a farmer is, the more likely he is to be a violent agitator for financial or political change.
“There seems to be a growing weakness among whole masses of our people,” he went on, “which leads them to look to the Government for help instead of to themselves in their own industry and thrift. Not only the farmers are affected by it, for every demand upon the Government for special legislation in the interest of one class or another is evidence of this spirit. We need very much, as a people, to relearn the simple, common-sense maxims of Benjamin Franklin, and to practise them.”
I told him something at this point of my past winter in Chicago--of an army of unemployed and of other armies of underpaid workers, and of hosts of sweat-shop victims who could scarcely be said to be lacking in industry and at least a measure of enforced economy.
He listened patiently and with some curiosity, I thought, and when I had done he took up the subject quite eagerly.