In addition to this, his wants, and the wants of the members of the family are increased two or three times. They cannot live as they lived on the farm. They cannot dress as they dressed in the country. The pressure of these increasing economic wants, demanding to be satisfied out of a diminished income, with higher prices for the things to be purchased, keeps the retired farmer a poor man. The result is that the retired farmer is opposed to every step of progress in the growing town in which he lives. He opposes every increase of taxation and fights every assessment. He dreads a subscription list and hates to hear of contributions. Although an intelligent and pious man, he has come to be an obstacle to the building of libraries, churches and schools and opposed to all humane and missionary activities. He is suffering from a great economic mistake. Before leaving the exploiter it is to be said he also has his church. The exploiter has built no community. He has contributed the retired farmer to the large towns and small cities of the Middle West. It is natural, therefore, that few exploiter churches are found in the country. But in the larger centers there are churches whose doctrine and methods are those of the exploiter. Indeed, at the present time the exploiter's doctrine in ethics and religion is highly popular. It is the doctrine of the consecration of wealth. There are in the larger cities churches whose business is to give; Sunday after Sunday they hear pleas and consider the cases of college presidents, superintendents of charities, secretaries of mission boards and other official solicitors. These churches have systematized the discipline of giving. Their boards of officers control the appeals that shall be made to their people. Such churches are highly individualist in character, and the preacher who ministers in such a church has a doctrine of individual culture and responsibility. The exploiter's doctrine of systematic giving has gone into all of the communities in which prosperous people live. It has become a moral code for millionaires, and the response to it is annually measured in the great gifts of men of large means to institutions which exist for the use of all mankind. But not all the farm exploiters retired from the farm. The stronger and more successful have become absentee landlords. These men have invested their cash in farm lands. Distrusting the investments of the city market, and fearing Wall Street, they have purchased increased acreage in the country, and when the local market was exhausted, they have invested in the Southwest and the far West, buying ever more and more land. They have proven that "It is possible to maintain a vicious economic method on a rising market."[10]