How to Get a Farm and Where to Find One Author:Edmund Morris Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. What makes Land valuable — Prices balancing each other — How poor Men pay for high-priced Farms—A practical Illustration—A Farm for the Righ... more »t Man. Whilk it is thus seen that there are millions of families who desire no better homestead than such as can be secured by settlement on the public domain, it is well known that there are other millions who prefer remaining in the neighborhood in which they were born. They prefer hard work there to hard work in the West. That region is new, and large portions of it are comparatively unsettled. The other is old, and possesses all the conveniences and comforts of a long-established civilization. Relations and friends are there concentrated, and among them they prefer remaining. It furnishes a quick market for all productions of the earth, and at better prices. Fruits and vegetables, which, on a thousand prairie farms, would iind no purchaser, are here salable in every town or city. Here the consumers are collected in great crowded marts, while there they have not yet had time to congregate in equal masses. Land within the seaboard region is consequently more valuable, and, as a general rule, is unattainable by small capitalists in proportion to its value. Butits ability to yield quick and certain returns makes its possession extremely desirable. Its money-producing power is enormous, because of its nearness to a dense population of consumers. As to this fact it owes its chief value, so, from the same fact, the small capitalist who becomes possessed of it la enabled to pay for it by the ready and profitable market he finds for all that it may produce. Thus price has its compensations. If the cost of land be high, the value which its productions command in the market is generally in exact proportion. High price fo...« less