fight, in either the military or the industrial army, and who by the fortunes of war have been incapacitated for further fighting. This is a wonderful field

for creative statesmanship.

There is another way in which the states may be of assistance, not only to the disabled returned soldier but to other soldiers as well, that is by the creation of a fund which may be loaned to those who desire to acquire small farms, and from which they may be assisted in the purchase of implements, seeds and stock the same idea as that underlying the Federal farm-loan bank, but strictly as a state affair, with a modest maximum loan and with the procedure simplified so that it will not be such a monumental sort of undertaking as it is to obtain a loan from the Federal bank. This could be made a permanent "revolving fund," much on the order of a building and loan association, with the people of the state furnishing the funds to be loaned, to be paid back minus profits or high interest or any except the bare expenses of administration and amortization.

The cry from all over the country is for land, and at the same time there is scarcely a state in the Union in which there are not tremendous areas owned by absentee landlords who are holding the land for speculation and at prices all out of proportion to what was paid for it. The states undoubtedly have the right to invoke the sovereign power of eminent domain. If the state can delegate this power to a railroad for the public good therein contained, surely the state itself can employ it to reacquire its soil to be used for the general good.

There has been a steady drift away from the farms

for years. It has been because the people who live upon the farms do not in the main own them. They cannot pay the rents and make profits. They have not the incentive to improve the usually squalid, bare, unhomelike houses and premises. So great has been the drift away from the soil that only by the utmost exertions, only by shifting labor to the country and enlisting the coöperation of former agricultural workers and schoolboys and girls, was our immense agricultural domain able to meet the food crisis of 1917 and 1918. It is time for the states to be considering this question, basing their consideration upon the fundamental axiom that a home-owning citizen is a satisfied, happy and valuable citizen. The announced policy of the Government to reeducate the disabled of industry is going to throw a vast new problem into the hands of the states for adjustment. The United States Government will furnish part of the money for reëducation, but the actual reëducating, the placement and after-care of the industrial disabled is going to be strictly a state problem. And these people must have land to live upon.

The bill now pending in Congress for the rehabilitation of the disabled of industry provides that the United States shall appropriate approximately a million dollars annually, to be distributed on a basis of population engaged in industry among the states agreeing to match the Federal grant dollar for dollar, the funds to be spent under the direction of the Federal Board for Vocational Education in the vocational rehabilitation of those who have been permanently disabled as the result of industrial accident. Every state in the Union is going to accept these pro

visions. There is no set of state officials or legislators who would dare face an outraged constituency and admit helping to reject the Federal grant. Every worker in every state will vote solidly for the men who are in favor of accepting it, and thus putting the state in the march of progress to do justice to its disabled workers.

The placement of the industrial disabled after they are reëducated is going to be strictly a state problem, and it will inevitably bring forward the land question. Many of the disabled of industry are subject to diseases for which the nature of their occupations is largely responsible, such as pulmonary complaints among textile workers, and the like. These people will have to be educated for open-air occupations; after they are educated, where are they going to exercise their knowledge and training? Not on the public roads or commons or on rented land at rents which squeeze all the profit out of their endeavors! They must have land, and they will have land.

Thus, although the work for the disabled soldiers is not particularly a state problem, and the brunt of it is being borne by the Federal Government, it behooves the states to begin organizing to work in close cooperation with the Federal Government in order to insure the maximum of benefit. Furthermore, the problem of taking care of the disabled industrial workers promises to be a live issue and a permanent one in every state that has an appreciable class of workers in industry.

Thus do we progress. We rose to heights of pure justice in securing to the disabled soldier the right to