The commercial exploitation of land dissolves every permanent factor in the farm economy. The country community of the land-farmer type is being undermined and is crumbling away under the influence of exploitation. The pioneers were a Westward emigration, pushing Westward the boundaries of the country at the rate of fifty miles in a decade; but since 1890 emigration has been eastward, and it is made up of farmers who move to ever cheaper and cheaper lands to the East, the tide of higher prices coming from the West. Already in central Illinois the values of land seem to have reached the high water mark. About Galesburg "the Swedes have got hold of the land and they will not sell." Among the last recorded sales in this district were some at prices between two hundred and two hundred fifty dollars per acre. It is not generally understood that this exploitation of farm lands has extended over nearly the whole country. Its spread is increasingly rapid in the last two years. In the Gulf States and the Carolinas and in Tennessee and Kentucky prices of farm land have increased in the last five years from twenty-five to one hundred per cent. Even in the most conservative counties in Pennsylvania the prices of farm land have increased twenty to twenty-five per cent. The sign of this exploitation is a rapid increase in the market values of farm land, due to frequent sale and purchase. This increase is independent of any increase in essential value to the farmer. The net income of the farmer may have been increased only five per cent, as in the State of Indiana, whereas the values of farm land have increased in the same period more than one hundred per cent. That is, the speculative increases have been twenty times as much as the agricultural increase. Along with this change in farm values goes the increase or decrease in the number of tenant farmers and the shifting of the ownership of land to farm landlords. In some parts of the country this exploitation has taken a purely speculative form. In all parts it is speculative in character, but in some sections of the country the exploiters are themselves farmers and the process is imposed upon the farmers themselves by economic causes. This is true of the Illinois and Indiana lands, which are under the influence of a system of drainage, but there are other portions of the country in which the process is chiefly speculative. In some Western States the exploitation of farm land is in the hands of speculators themselves, doing real estate business purely as a matter of trade. It would be a mistake, however, to attribute a process so general as this one to the power exerted by a class of real estate agents. Its causes are deeper than the commercial process. They go into the very roots of modern life. This should be clearly understood, because when frankly realized it compels the adjustment of social, educational and religious work to the period of exploitation.