Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 March 1888 — MORTGAGES ON OUR FARMS. [ARTICLE]

MORTGAGES ON OUR FARMS.

Figures Showing Mow Enormous Is the Burden Imposed. [From the New York Times.] The amounts represented by the faces of the farm mortgages in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, lowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri are: Jn Ohio $ 701,001,000 In Indiana 308,000,000 In Illinois 620,000,000 In Wisconsin 250,000,000 In Michigan...., 350.000,000 In Minnesota 175,000,000 In lowa 351.000,000 In Nebraska 140,000,000 In Kansas 200,000,000 In Missouri 237,000,000 Total farm mortgages in the ,„.,jjen States $3,422,000,000 The actual value of the farms lying in the ten States is to-day about $13,931,000,000. In this valuation due allowance has been made for the enormous volume of emigration which has poured into Kansas, Nebraska and Minnesota, and into the northern portions of Michigan and Wisconsin since 1880. All talk relative to this vast sum of money ever being paid is utter folly. No agricultural people can pay such sums. The profit derived from American agriculture is now so small as to be unworthy of the slightest consideration. To illustrate this fact: The interest money annually drawn from the ten States listed, if they pay 7 per cent, only, amounts to $239,000,000. The profits of agrioultnre do not warrant the payment of so great a sum. The total value of the farm products of the United States was, in 1879, $2,213,000,000. Of this value the ten States I have listed produced $839,000,000. This was the total value sold, consumed, and on hand. Say that the ten States now produce to the value of $1,000,000,000. If but one-half the farms are mortgaged the produce they yield is worth $500,000,000. At least $239,000,000 of that value goes to pay interest money, leaving $261,000,000 of produce to support 886,000 farmers and their families, or $294 to each farmer. Out of this small sum they must pay labor, pay taxes, supply seed, buy tools, and they and their families live. The sum is entirely inadequate. It is not possible for these mortgaged farmers, as a class, to ever lift their mortgages. Legislative enactment cannot increase the price these men receive for their products, but it is possible to decrease the price they now pay for the goods which they consume. These men, though their names are borne on the assessment rolls as the owners of the farms they till, are actually tenants. They ceased to be freeholders the instant they mortgaged their land. The price they have paid for American manufacturing industries has been their birthright. A continuance of the system will surely cause the larger portion of the farmers whose land is still unincumbered to mortgage their lands. Under our present tariff the Eastern manufacturers have accumulated all that the agricultural West has created without being able to save.