Our most urgent need is to unearth our hidden wealth, to develop our enormous undeveloped resources, of which our uncultivated or half-cultivated land is the greatest part. Our first business, then, is plainly to get population, people able and willing to work. We have to devise new plans of settlement, of land-holding or land arrangement, of agricultural production and agricultural commerce—yes, and agricultural manufacture, so that we shall no longer depend almost wholly on the sale of raw material. Every possible avenue must be explored, every resource of human ingenuity taxed to the utmost, brushing aside all obstructive traditions and conventions, and thoroughly testing every plan with one glimmer of hope in it, to get and keep a large and permanent, because successful and contented, body of people doing this vital work.
It is not the big wheat farm or cattle ranch that means big population, but just the opposite.
Most of the new settlers we can hope to get will be poor. Small farming, and often very small farming, is the only kind possible to them. What of that?
It was the small man, the poor man, with little or no capital beyond his own body and brains, who built up this country from the beginning. It is the small man, reinforcing us in his hundreds of thousands from the mother country and from many other lands, that we must get to build it up with fresh vigor from now on. Yes, and we must give him a better chance than he ever had under the broadcasting, go-as-you-like, sink-or-swim homestead system, which so often allowed him to sink, with grievous loss both to him and to the country.
There is no fear for the wheat supply. Any cutting down of the present wheat acreage, beyond what may be required from time to time to prevent over-production, will be made up for by the multitude of small wheat fields on the multitude of small farms that will now come into existence.
The small farmer, if he thinks and plans his way carefully, is not only self-supporting—able to feed his family even if the rest of the world should sink under the sea, and independent of labor costs, which are the last straw on many a big farmer’s back; he is also independent, to a degree which few yet realize, of the foreign market, and of unfortunate conditions abroad that keep that market down.