THE SINGLE-TAX AND AGRARIAN MOVEMENTS At the root of all the radical movements in the United States lies, actually or potentially, an unsatisfied land hunger, a feeling that somehow the opportunity to have access to a standing on God’s footstool is circumscribed by man-made restrictions and injustice. It is to be remembered that the great majority of immigrants to this country are peasants, whose whole life and social background have reference to making, or being prevented from making, a living from the soil. Even the Russian and other Jews, who, generally speaking, have little or no actual experience of agriculture, come here with a vision of a land where there is satisfaction for their deepest longings, and at the bottom lies the longing to own a piece of the face of the earth as a basis for subsistence. Generally speaking, the first disillusionment that many a modern immigrant experiences is in the fact that he cannot step from the ship into the ownership of land out of which to dig his living. It is a short step from that state of mind into one of general discontent with the difficulty of finding the opportunity which, he had been told, waited for him in the United States at every street corner and crossroad. In the earlier days, when industrialism was younger in this country and immigrants could pass more easily into agriculture and into access to actual land, there was a wider and quicker interest on the part of the immigrant in the land question as such. Probably that is why he responded more than he does now to such movements as the individualist single-tax agitation precipitated by Henry George. In recent years, when his opportunities for employment came to be more and more restricted to the cities and to great industrial plants and mines, the appeal of the Socialist agitation seemed more applicable to his situation. Furthermore, the single-tax movement represents, on the whole, an earlier stage in the development of radical theory. The same might be said of Greenbackism, Populism, and the present-day Nonpartisan League movement. All three of these movements find the body of their rank and file among the small farmers, small producers, and the dissatisfied lower grades of the merchandising class, who feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are getting the worst of it in the development of law, taxation, finance, monopoly, or what not. The contented foreign born, or the contented anybody else, does not participate in or respond to radical agitation or movements for drastic reform. There are thousands of foreign-born members in the Nonpartisan League, but they are in it not as foreign born of any race, but as farmers who think they are not getting a square deal.