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one fifth of the price on taking possession, and the remainder in fifty years. In the beginning the Act does not appear to have been a glowing success, and by 1903 only 62 small holdings, covering 248 acres, had been sold, and 166 holdings, covering 373 acres, let. Recent amendments of the Act, however, appear to have aroused more interest, and it is now asserted that, " since the passing of the Small Holdings Act, upwards of 47,000 small holdings have been applied for in various parts of the country." 99 1

We would not be misunderstood. A universal system of small holdings would be good for no country, as a certain number of large farms, assisted by abundant capital, are needed to set the pace in the improvement of agricultural methods. And in the United States, it is hoped, small holdings on the British scale will not have to be considered for many generations, while we never want the peasant farmer. But we do want the cultivation of that spirit which has made Danish agriculture, in spite of great obstacles, such a marvelous success; and it is imperative to avoid, if we can, the growth of those conditions which have drawn so much of the best rural blood of England to the cities. Both of these objects, we believe, will be measurably advanced by the encouragement of intensive farming.

Ownership and Tenancy. The essential facts bearing upon the subject of farm ownership and tenure are summarized in Table II, which is presented on the following page.

Section A of the table shows that cash and share tenancy are increasing in the United States, and that the proportion of farms operated by their owners was smaller in 1900 than in either 1890 or 1880. Two interpretations of this phenomenon have been advanced. According to the first, which is based partially upon the statistics cited in Section B of the table, the growth of tenancy is due primarily to the increasingly rapid rise of farm laborers from the position of wage earner to that of tenant. In this view, accordingly, the increase of tenancy is encouraging. According to the second interpretation, based partially upon the facts presented in Sections C and E, the growth of tenancy is not an encouraging 1 The Westminster Review, May, 1908, p. 516. For the history of the legislation, see L. Jebb, The Small Holdings of England, Chap. IX.

TABLE II

STATISTICS OF FARM OWNERSHIP AND FARM TENURE IN THE UNITED STATES 1880-1900

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A, B, and D from Twelfth Census, Agriculture, Part I, pp. lxxvii, lxxxviii; C and E from Twelfth Census, Population, Part II, p. ccxi. The statistics under B are in the nature of estimates, a small number of female owners and tenants being included under "laborers and others.' The aggregate percentages under A differ from those under C, owing to the fact that they were collected by different departments of the census, and apply to slightly differ

ent areas.

sign, and indicates that it is becoming more and more difficult to acquire ownership of land in this country. The statistics of ownership under C prove that there is a steady movement from tenancy to ownership as farmers grow older. More than 70 per cent of the farmers between 45 and 54 years of age, but only 45.3 per cent of those between 25 and 34 years of age, owned the farms which they operated in 1900. This steady advance is encouraging; but the comparison of the figures for 1900 and 1890 indicates that the rate of advance is declining. Moreover, the statistics presented in Section E show that the proportion of owned farms which were burdened with indebtedness was, for every age group, larger in 1900 than in 1890.

The statistics presented in Table II and the two interpretations of their meaning are not, in reality, inconsistent. Tenancy is more frequent in the South Central and South Atlantic states than in other sections of the country, and more prevalent among negroes than any other class of farmers. Here, evidently, tenancy does represent an advance. The negroes who are tenants to-day were farm laborers a few years ago and slaves a half century back. On the other hand, tenancy is also prevalent and growing in the richest farming district of the country, a district in which farm values are high and advancing very rapidly; and in this district the North Central states - there is evidence of a close though not perfect correlation between farm values and tenancy.1

There is no cause for grave alarm concerning farm tenancy in this country. Although the census of 1900 revealed one landlord who owned 704 farms worth $4,545,230, Section D of Table II shows that 80 per cent of the landlords owned only I rented farm, and 96.8 per cent less than 5 rented farms; while the additional fact that 78.8 per cent of the landlords lived in the same county in which their farms were located proves that absentee landlordism has not developed to any extent in this country. But we cannot regard present tendencies with all the complacency exhibited by some writers." For not only has it been shown that the increase

1 See H. C. Taylor, Agricultural Economics, pp. 224-250.

See Twelfth Census, "Agriculture," Part I, pp. lxxvii-lxxxi; and E. L Bogart in the Journal of Political Economy for April, 1908.

of tenancy in the North Central states is probably due to the increasing difficulty of acquiring land consequent upon advancing land values; but tenancy is bound to increase as land values advance, unless the American farmer learns how to get a living from smaller holdings. When land goes to $200 an acre, the average young farmer can neither save enough nor command enough credit to buy a farm of 160 acres and equip it properly. We shall have either more tenancy in the older sections of the country, as time passes, or smaller farms and a different type of agriculture. As stated above, the latter change would probably do more good than harm in the land. Our only fear is that the American farmer will not adjust himself to it rapidly enough.

And it is doubtful whether we ought to derive comfort from an increase in the proportion of owners as shown in Section B of Table II - when this increase results from an exodus of the agricultural population to the cities, which must itself be regarded with grave apprehension. Census officials explain away the increase of tenancy by dividing the agricultural class into three reservoirs, owners, tenants, and others (presumably laborers), and assure us that the swelling volume of the middle reservoir is due to an increasingly rapid flow from the labor reservoir to the tenant reservoir, rather than a decreasingly rapid flow from the tenant reservoir to the reservoir of owners. But what about the flow from the labor reservoir to non-agricultural occupations? And how much of the diminution of ownership in trade and manufactures should be charged against the increase of ownership in agriculture? It is a condition, not a theory, confronting us, and when we start to explain this condition, it is not permissible to halt midway in the explanation.1

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Farm Labor. Although the agricultural account, to use a bookkeeper's metaphor, must be debited with any evil resulting from the rural exodus, before we can strike a proper balance of social profit and loss, the condition of those laborers who have remained upon the farms has unquestionably been improved by

1 Two other agricultural problems of great importance might logically be introduced here share versus cash tenancy and a consideration of the conditions under which it is better for a young farmer to hire than attempt to buy a farm. The latter problem is considered in connection with other relevant questions on page 540 of this chapter. The former question involves a discussion of the details of farm leases, and must be left to the larger treatises, although we may venture the suggestion that more depends upon the customs and conditions of peculiar localities than upon any inherent superiority of the cash rental.

this exodus. The movement of the wages of farm labor since the Civil War is described statistically in Table III, following. From this it appears that farm wages were higher in the last

TABLE III

WAGES OF FARM LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES FOR SPECIFIED YEARS: 1866-1902

(Wages expressed in currency for the years 1866, 1869, 1875)

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NOTE. - Broad averages are particularly unsatisfactory in dealing with the wages of farm labor, and the reader should regard this table not as an exact exhibit of money wages, but as a compendious method of describing a social movement the details of which are beyond the scope of this treatise. For a more adequate discussion, see Bulletin No. 26, Miscellaneous Series, U. S. Department of Agriculture.

year for which statistics are available than ever before, if we properly discount the inflated currency in which wages were paid in 1866, 1869, and 1875; and the rough estimates of the purchasing power of farm wages given in the last column of the table indicate that real wages have steadily risen since 1866. Moreover, the testi

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