In the earliest days of the Republican-Nationalist movement led by Sun Yat-sen, emphasis was on land reform. Sun Yat-sen's family had suffered from overtaxation when he was a boy.[20] Nationalization and equalization of the land were slogans used at the founding of the _Tung Mêng Hui_; the program seems at that time to have been derived from old Chinese distributism and from Henry George.[21] With the coming of the Republic, two years went by, however, before any agrarian legislation was passed, and the new laws had no perceptible consequence.[22] The problem of land reform had to be fought out on the ideological front and placed above the military before it could become a fit subject for competent government action. The epoch of the _tuchüns_ added to agricultural misfortune. Militarism had a direct effect on the deterioration of the land economy, and an indirect one in that it led to the cultivation of opium as the one money-making crop which could meet the excessive tax demands of the militarists. A Chinese writer has described the years which marked the ending of the _tuchün_ system as follows: The ... misery among the farming population in the decennial period 1920-1930 [must be] attributed to (1) internal warfare; (2) neglect of agriculture; (3) low stage of art; and (4) over-population. The civil wars during the last eighteen years have increased the cost of production, have added to the farmers' ... burden of taxation, have raised the rate of interest on loan, and have caused endless suffering to [those] who form the basis of our social and economic life. Great many people have often wondered as to why a country like China with 75 per cent of her total population engaged in farming and with such a vast territory should suffer from the high cost of living; but to the student of social problems the question is comparatively simple, for the recurrence of civil war since the establishment of the Republic has [changed] conditions of supply and has driven millions of farmers out of cultivated areas, and this alone suffices to explain an unprecedented rise of prices of food and other necessities of life during the last few years, especially since 1926.[23] These conditions led to farmers' movements, which became effective, however, only as they merged with the broader ideological tendencies in China. The Farmers' Movement ... may ... be divided into four periods: (1) the period of reaction to bad conditions ... (1921-1925); (2) the period of communistic activities and violence (1925-1927); (3) the period of retrenchment and preparation for reconstruction (from the spring of 1927-1928); and (4) the period of reconstruction (since 1928).[24]