Someone will say that this is untrue; that the returns from an acre of land are today greater than in former years. What I mean is that an acre of land cropped for ten or fifteen or twenty years is no more valuable today as a producer of grain or live stock than it was then. The added value of the crop is due to better markets, better implements, better knowledge of agriculture. In other words it is a net gain due to labor and intelligence, and as such should go to labor. Instead of that it is consumed in rent. With every advance in the values of Western lands and the consequent narrowing of the opportunities afforded the landless man of the Eastern and Central States, the values, or rather the prices, of these older lands advance. And if the speculator is able at this time to force the price of land up by leaps and bounds—if he can take raw prairie and, without adding to its value by so much as one furrow of breaking or one bushel of ripened grain, can make it double his money for him, how will it be when the last of the tillable public lands are taken? How will it be when the only desirable vacant lands are held for speculative purposes? How will it be when there is no alternative between paying some farmer for a part of his holding or paying some land company its price, based upon monopolistic values? Today, in the West, favored by cheap land—$25 to $30 an acre—I am giving $1.30 as rental for every $1.00 I receive as tenant. Here it still is possible for a man to start single handed and win a farm, but the crops remain about the same, the prices are slowly bettering, the cost of the bare necessities of living is lowering, the price of land is rapidly advancing, the rental is going up, and my wages as a tenant are becoming relatively less. I can still say, “Unless you give me a living chance, I will go to the free lands and make my own home.” I still can pay for a home for myself here. But I know that a decade hence conditions will have changed. There will be no ‘farther West’ in the sense in which we know it today. The increased land values will shut out a great body of men from becoming land owners, or they will achieve their aim only at the expense of a life-time of grinding toil. The basis of a landed aristocracy on the one hand, and of a landless tenant class on the other will have been laid. And you do not live so far to the Eastward, nor are you so deeply buried in the great cities that the thrill of that new birth of despotism shall not reach you, and be a portent of danger to your independence as a citizen and as a man.