to
failure. Lacking the essential business experience and the ability to
cooperate, they were soon undone, and after a few years little more was
heard of cooperation.

In the meantime another economic movement gained momentum under the
leadership of George Henry Evans, who was a land reformer and may be
called a precursor of Henry George. Evans inaugurated a campaign for
free farms to entice to the land the unprosperous toilers of the city.
In spite of the vast areas of the public domain still unoccupied, the
cities were growing denser and larger and filthier by reason of the
multitudes from Ireland and other countries who preferred to cast
themselves into the eager maw of factory towns rather than go out as
agrarian pioneers. To such Evans and other agrarian reformers made their
appeal. For example, a handbill distributed everywhere in 1846 asked:

"Are you an American citizen? Then you are a joint owner of the public
lands. Why not take enough of your property to provide yourself a home?
Why not vote yourself a farm?

"Are you a party follower? Then you have long enough employed your vote
to benefit scheming office seekers. Use it for once to benefit yourself;
Vote yourself a farm.

"Are you tired of slavery--of drudging for others--of poverty and its
attendant miseries? Then, vote yourself a farm.

"Would you free your country and the sons of toil everywhere from the
heartless, irresponsible mastery of the aristocracy of avarice?.... Then
join with your neighbors to form a true American party...whose chief
measures will be first to limit the quantity of land that any one may
henceforth monopolize or inherit; and second to make the public
lands free to actual settlers only, each having the right to sell his
improvements to any man not possessed of other lands."

"Vote yourself a farm" became a popular shibboleth and a part of the
standard programme of organized labor. The donation of public lands to
heads of families, on condition of occupancy and cultivation for a term
of years, was proposed in bills repeatedly introduced in Congress. But
the cry of opposition went up from the older States that they would be
bled for the sake of the newer, that giving land to the landless was
encouraging idleness and wantonness and spreading demoralization, and
that Congress had no more power to give away land than it had to give
away money. These arguments had their effect at the Capitol, and it
was not until the new Republi