Puslapio vaizdai
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URING the last three years I have watched the incoming tide of immigrants as it passed through Ellis Island from Scandinavia, Italy, Greece, and central Europe, and wondered, with many other Americans, why it was that on their arrival in this country the peasants of Europe abandoned the only calling with which they were familiar and flocked to the cities and mining-camps. Three quarters of our immigrants go into industry, while those who go to the land frequently drift back to the cities in a few months. It is not that there is not land enough, for if America were peopled as densely as are many countries in Europe, we could sustain ten times our present population. To-day the population of the United States is only 30 for each square mile. In Belgium it rises to 671 a square mile; in the United Kingdom to 382; in Switzerland to 237; in Italy to 318; in

France to 191; in Denmark to 178; and in Austria to 224.

Thinking that possibly the immigrants did not know of the farming opportunities, I gathered together 150 Italians who were ready for admission. I told them of opportunities in the agricultural regions, with wages at from thirty to fifty dollars a month, and then requested a showing of hands of those who would go out as farmlaborers if the opportunity were offered them. Out of the group less than a dozen responded. I made the same proposal to a group of Greeks, and only a handful of them were willing to go to the land. Yet almost all of these men had come from farms or small villages and were familiar with agricultural life.

The attitude of these aliens reflects the attitude of the American people. They are abandoning the farm. The State Board of Board of Agriculture of New York

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recently announced that out of 22,000,000 acres of land in that State only 8,200,000 or thirty-seven per cent., is being cultivated, and that of a total population of over 10,000,000 persons only 375,000 are agriculturalists. It is said that less than one third of the cultivable land in the country is properly tilled at all. Tens of millions of dollars are being spent by the federal and state governments to encourage farming and maintain agricultural colleges, and yet a large proportion of the boys trained for farming seek other employments. There is a constant drift of boys and girls from the farms to the cities, and no compensating drift from the city to the country. The population of our cities is growing year by year, while the number of persons engaged in the production of food is relatively, if not absolutely, diminishing.

What is the matter with farming? Why does the farmer abandon the land or let it to another? Why the shortage of food in the most fertile land in the world? Surely these questions are susceptible of answer.

I am satisfied that the current explanations of the decadence of agriculture are inadequate. I do not believe that men leave the farms willingly or that they will not go to the land if it is made profitable to them to do so. Hundreds of thousands

of our people from the middle West moved into Canada before the war, and thousands of applicants present themselves whenever an Indian reservation is opened up to settlement. Moreover, there are millions of farmers who are tenants, and five millions more who are agricultural workers. This is proof enough that men, even under the most unsatisfactory conditions, are willing to remain on the land. All over the country tenancy is increasing very rapidly, and along with it a rapid rise in the price of land. The working of farms is passing from owners to tenants. Taking the country as a whole, farm tenancy increased from 25.6 per cent. in 1880 to 28.4 per cent. in 1890. In 1900 it jumped to 35.3 per cent., and to 37 per cent. in 1910. In the latter year there were 2,354,676 tenant farmers in the country. In some States tenancy is becoming the rule. In Iowa the number of tenants shot up from 23.8 per cent. to 37.8 per cent. in thirty years. In Oklahoma, from 1900 to 1910, it increased from 43.8 per cent. to 54.8 per cent. In Alabama the increase in thirty years was from 46.8 per cent. to 60.2 per cent., while in Texas the increase from 1880 to 1910 was from 37.6 per cent. to 52.6 per cent. From 1910 to the present time the increase in tenancy is even more rapid than in previous years. In some counties in the West

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where more recent censuses have been taken farm tenancy had risen above 70 per cent., and was close to 80 per cent. of the total. As compared with this condition, France is a nation of home-owning farmers, while in little Denmark, the country which has developed agriculture into an exact science, only ten per cent. of the farmers are tenants, and the number is being rapidly reduced.

The reports from States like Texas and Oklahoma read very much like the stories of Ireland in the days of the famine. They show that the tenants are largely American-born whites; that the whole family works upon the land; that their united efforts keep them barely above the poverty-line, and that the tenants are indifferent and ignorant. They do not send their children to school; they exhaust the ground as quickly as possible, and then drift on to another farm.

Here is discouragement enough to drive these farmers from the soil; yet despite all these difficulties, there are 219,000 agriculturalists in Texas alone who are willing to stay on the land as tenants, while Oklahoma, Iowa, and many other Western States are but little better. Now, tenancy is not only bad for the tenant; it is destructive of agriculture. Tenancy destroys ambition, enterprise, hope. Ultimately it drives the tenant from the land,

as it did in England and Ireland. From the time of John Stuart Mill down to the present, political economists have condemned tenant-farming as destructive of farming and the farmer as well.

Herein is one explanation of the decay of agriculture in the United States. Nearly forty per cent. of our farmers are tenants. Along with this, the public domain of the nation is gone. There is no more free land. Land values have gone up in consequence. The value of farming. land in the United States increased one hundred and eighteen per cent. in ten years' time. It has acquired a speculative price, and is held at so high a figure that buyers can make a living, if at all, only by the hardest kind of application. This has made it difficult for the man with a little capital to become a farmer. This is true not only in the East; it is true in the West as well, where the great estates carved out of the public domain, sometimes of a million acres in extent, are being cut up into small holdings and sold to immigrants and workers from the cities. Instances have been reported to a California commission of men who had accumulated from two thousand to five thousand dollars and who had purchased worthless farms, only to lose their entire savings because they could not meet the annual payments. They paid from one hundred to three

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hundred dollars an acre for land that was not worth one third that sum. One instance was reported of a colony of Russians whose members had invested $150,000 in worthless hard-pan in a Western State, while great numbers of persons have been lured into the reclamation projects of the Southwest, which are so inhospitable and hot that women are able to live there only a portion of the year.

I have in my possession reports of individual men who have been induced to invest all they possessed in land on which they worked for two or three years and realized less than two hundred dollars a year from it; of men who had responded to some alluring advertisement, and had lost the accumulations of ten or twenty years' labor in a worthless investment.

This by no means exhausts the explanations of the decay of agriculture or the drift of population from the farm. In ability to dispose of crops; the lack of organized marketing facilities; the protest against railroads, commission brokers, and middlemen, and the feeling on the part of the farmer that if he produces a large crop it may rot in the fields, and that if the crop is short the profits which should come to him are taken by the speculators. It is this feeling that lies back

of the Non-Partizan Movement of farmers, which had its birth in North Dakota a year ago and swept the State at the last election, and is now expanding into South Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, and the far Western States. This Non-Partizan Movement is a political movement, its platform being the public ownership of grain-elevators, of terminals and slaughterhouses, of state credit to the farmer, and of adequate protection against the fraudulent grading of wheat, and such control of the packing-houses and cold-storage plants as will give the farmer a secure market for his produce.

The Western farmer insists that he wants to farm, that he has no desire to go to the city, but that economic conditions over which he has no control are making it increasingly difficult for him to make a living. It is this that is driving him and his children into the city, just as it is the incoming immigrant.

The fact is, agriculture is breaking down. The old order of things really ended ten or twenty years ago, and a study of land monopoly, of tenancy, of farm credits and marketing conditions confirms the farmer's complaint. Strangely enough, that which has happened to America has happened to other countries, including

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