A LARGELY DISPOSSESSED NATION.
These are the statistics of a Government which, it is known, seeks to make its showing as favorable as possible to the existing regime. They make it clear that a rapid process of the dispossession of the industrial working, the middle and the small farming classes has been going on unceasingly. If the process was so marked in 1900 what must it be now? All of the factors operating to impoverish the farming population of the United States and turn them into homeless tenants have been a thousandfold intensified and augmented in the last ten years, beginning with the remarkable formation of hundreds of trusts in 1898. Even though the farmer may get higher prices for his products, as he did in 1908 and 1909, the benefits are deceptively transient, while the expropriating process is persistent.
There was a time when farm land in Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana, Wisconsin, and many other States was considered of high value. But in the last few years an extraordinary sight has been witnessed. Hundreds of thousands of American farmers migrated to the virgin fields of Northwest Canada and settled there—a portentous movement significant of the straits to which the American farmer has been driven.
Abandoned farms in the East are numerous; in New York State alone 22,000 are registered. Hitherto the farmer has considered himself a sort of capitalist: if not hostile to the industrial working classes, he has been generally apathetic. But now he is being forced to the point of being an absolute dependant himself, and will inevitably align his interests with those of his brothers in the factories and in the shops.
With this contrast of the forces at work which gave empires of public domain to the few, while dispossessing the tens of millions, we will now proceed to a consideration of some of the fortunes based upon railroads.