The burdens which these people are staggering under can be easily
imagined when it is known that they have been paying interest on
mortgages for years that the places would not now sell for, even after
they were improved by years of labor and the outlay of much money. In
the San Joaquin valley, for instance, there are homesteads by the
thousands that will not sell for what they are mortgaged for, and the
extraordinary spectacle was witnessed in the city of San Francisco last
year of a bank having to close because it could not sell out the valley
farmers for the mortgages due it. Of course these farmers obtained money
from the bank, and the justice of the bank's claim is not what we are
now trying to get at, but to show that if we had the laws that belong to
a republic the people would not be the victims of bankers or any one
else. Had they been allowed in the first place to take possession of all
unimproved land without having to give up the savings of years to some
land grabber, whose theft was authorized and sustained by law, and then
loaded down with interest obligations, they would have had no more
trouble in keeping their land than they would in keeping an arm or a
leg.
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