People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 June 1895 — Farming Statistics. [ARTICLE]

Farming Statistics.

The American farmer has long held a place greatly above that of the peasant of Continental Europe ill his income and style of living, because he has been able to possess a larger tract of land, and greatly above the English tenant-farmer in his independence, because he has been able to own the ground he tilled. He will not continue another half-century to hold this enviable position. The economic forces that have been at work in Europe have also been at work here, but not so long, and therefore they have not yet matured so much fruit. There have been Americans who imagined that our political constitution would protect us from the fate of the Old world. It would be as rational for a man to expect his knowledge of arithmetic to keep him dry in a thunderstorm. Sometimes we find the American farmer slipping away from his acres, and sometimes we find his acres slipping away from him; as a result of both tendencies there is a separation, widening with the lapse of time, between ownership and cultivation. The American farmer is following the English yeoman into extinction, and the creation of landlord and tenant classes has already made considerable progress here. Specialization is one of the incidents of evolution, and evolution in agriculture is giving us, instead of one class of farmers, who were simultaneously landlord, tenant and laborer, farmers of the there classes, permanantly distinct, Between 1880 and 1890 the number of owning-farmers decreased in every New England State, and the number of tenantfarmers increased. In each of these States there was a marked increase in the percentage of farmers who plowed the fields of another man, and in the sweat of whose brow somebody in Boston ate cake. In the six States, in the ten years, the owning farmers diminished 24,117 and the tenantfarmers increased 7,246. The percentage of tenant-farmers in Massachusetts, though not large in 1890, was nearly double what it was in 1880; over 17 per cent of the farmers in Vermont and Conneticut and 25 per cent of the farmers in Rhode Island were tenants in 1890. In each of the four middle States the number of owning-farmers decreased and the tenant-farmers increased. In the group the owners decreased 42,304 and the tenants increased 24,075. In New Jersey the tenants increased from nearly a fourth to nearly a third of the whole. In New York the loss of owning-farmers was 26,534, and the gain of tenant-farm-ers was 12,108. For Pennsylvania these figures were 11,292 and 9,222 respectively. In the South farm tenancy is largely the result of the emancipation of the slaves. So far as the increase of tenancy is due to thetransformation of the colored men from hired hands to tenants, it is a benefical change. This might be deemed a sufficient explanation of the increase of tenancy in the South, were there not such an increase of tenancy in the East and the West. Of twelve Southern States six show a decrease in the number of owning farmers. In the group there was an increase of 13,915 owning-farmers and 275.705 ten-ant-farmers. In three Southwestern States, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas, there was a gain of 47,882 owning- farmers and 114,510 tenant-farmers.

Persons who are unwilling to admit the evolution of landlord and tenant classes in this country will seek to explain these facts by the foreigner in New England and the negro in the South, and urge that the increase of tenacy is only local or temporary. But the increase of tenancy is not confined to those sections, nor to the Middle States. Each of the three States of the Middle West. Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, gives evidence of the same change, and the group lost 31,259 owning-farmers and gained 48,864 tenant-farmers. In Illinois the tenants increased from 31.37 to 36.72 per cent of the whole. In eight States of the Northwest, in several of which public lands have been obtainable till quite recently, the number of owning-farmers increased 129,322 and the num-

ber of tenant-farmers increased 108,507. In Iowa the number of owning-farmers increased 3,521, while the number of tenant-farm-ers 16,563. In Kansas the own-ing-farmers increased 2,121 and the tenant-farmers increased 30,463. In the Pacific Mountain States and the Territories the number of owning-farmers increased 65,512 and the number of tenant-farmers increased 20,350. In forty-seven States and Territories the number of own-ing-farmers increased 158,951 and the number of tenant-farm-ers increased 599,337. In 1880. 25.62 per cent of the farms were cultivated by tenants; in 1890, 34.13 per cent of the farm-fam-ilies hire. The classification of the two census is not identical, but there can be no serious decrepancy between the farms that are hired and families that hire. The process of the creation of landlord and tenant classes may be observed in any Western State. When land could be got ,for nothing of the government, or for a small price on a railroad grant, every settler could be a land owner. When land is worth twenty or thirty dollars an acre a considerable proportion of the rural residents must be tenants or laborers. . The average price of land sold last year in Jefferson county, Wis., a choice dairy section, was sixty dollars, an increase of nineteen dollars in three years. The Western farmers, who, many years ago, got their land for little or nothing, are now growing old. They are renting their farms to men who will live on less than the full product of the land rather than not live at all, and they are moving into the larger towns and the cities to enjoy life, educate their daughters, and start their sons in business. Even e.o far west as Minnesota and the Dakotas this is going on; in Illinois and Wisconsin it is a common thing. The tenants, being obliged to divide the produce with the landlord, are in a state of poverty, and will stay so. As they do not own the land, they will suffer dotrtead of profit as it advances in value. As the population increases, the value of land will increase and the number of persons who can afford to own land decrease. There is already started in the Northwest an agricultural peasantry which has no future except one of increasing rentcharges. The sharper the competition for chances to earn a' living the greater rent will the landlord be able to exact. In parts of Europe custom, and in Ireland the courts, limit the demands of the landlord, but in America all rents are rack-rents. The tenant will get a bare subsistence. and all else will go to the decendant of the ‘homesteader.’ The agricultural population of this country will in fifty years be poor and illiterate, made up of hired laborers on great estates of tenants and of proprietors of small patches of ground which they will cultivate with a spade and of whose produce they will eat only what cannot be sold. The substitution of tenants for owners has already had in parts of the West an injurious effect upon highways and schools; the removal of the most intelligent and prosperous farmers from a neighborhood, together with the substitution of tenants for owners, will make the agricultural population peculiarly the prey of demagogues, cranks and political adventurers. Such a population will not buy so much manufactured goods as the farming population we have been accustomed to. It may be premature to say that there is a concentration of agricultural landbolding, but so far as bur information goes it points in thatdirection.—Fred Perry Pow s ers, in Lippincott’s Magazine for February.