quick throbs, day and
night, a thousand dollars clatters into the gold-bin of the American
Farmer.

How incomprehensible it would seem to Pericles, who saw Greece in her
Golden Age, if he could know that the yearly revenue of his country is now
no more than one day's pay for the men who till the soil of this infant
Republic!

Or, how it would amaze a resurrected Christopher Columbus, if he were told
that the revenues of Spain and Portugal are not nearly as much as the
earnings of the American Farmer's Hen!

Merely the crumbs that drop from the Farmer's table (otherwise known as
agricultural exports), have brought him in enough of foreign money since
1892, so that he could, if he wished, settle the railway problem once for
all, by buying every foot of railroad in the United States.

Such is our New Farmer--a man for whom there is no name in any language.
He is as far above the farmer of the story-books, as a 1908 touring-car is
above a jinrikisha. Instead of being an ignorant hoe-man in a barn-yard
world, he gets the news by daily paper, daily mail, and telephone; and
incidentally publishes seven hundred trade journals of his own. Instead of
being a moneyless peasant, he pays the interest on the mortgage with the
earnings of four days, and his taxes with the earnings of a week. Even
this is less of an expense than it seems, for he borrows the money from
himself, out of his own banks, and spends the bulk of the tax money around
his own properties.

Farming for a business, not for a living--this is the _motif_ of the New
Farmer. He is a commercialist--a man of the twentieth century. He works as
hard as the Old Farmer did, but in a higher way. He uses the four
M's--Mind, Money, Machinery and Muscle; but as little of the latter as
possible.

Neither is he a Robinson Crusoe of the soil, as the Old Farmer was. His
hermit days are over; he is a man among men. The railway, the trolley, the
automobile and the top buggy have transformed him into a suburbanite. In
fact, his business has become so complex and many-sided, that he touches
civilisation at more points and lives a larger life than if he were one of
the atoms of a crowded city.

All American farmers, of course, are not of the New variety. The country,
like the city, has its slums. But after having made allowance for
exceptions, it is still true that the United States is the native land of
the New Farmer. He is the most typical human product that this country has