INCREASE OF FARM TENANTRY.
Without dwelling upon all the causative factors—involving an extended work in themselves—some significant general results will be pointed out.
The original area of public domain amounted to 1,815,504,147 acres, of which considerably more than half, embracing some of the very best agricultural, grazing, mineral and timber lands, was already alienated by the year 1880. By 1896 the alienation reached 806,532,362 acres. Of the original area, about 50,000,000 acres of forests have been withdrawn from the public domain by the Government, and converted into forest reservations. Large portions of such of the agricultural, grazing, mineral and timber lands as were not seized by various corporations and favored individuals before 1880, have been expropriated west of the Mississippi since then, and the process is still going, notably in Alaska. The nominal records of the General Land Office as to the number of homesteaders are of little value and are very misleading. Immense numbers of alleged homesteaders were, as we have copiously seen, nothing but paid dummies by whose entries vast tracts of land were seized under color of law. It is indisputably clear that hundreds of millions of acres of the public domain have been obtained by outright fraud.
Notwithstanding the fact that only a few years before, the Government had held far more than enough land to have provided every agriculturist with a farm, yet by 1880, a large farm tenant class had already developed. Not less than 1,024,061 of the 4,008,907 farms in the United States were held by renters. One-fourth of all the farms in the United States were cultivated by men who did not own them. Furthermore, and even more impressive, there were 3,323,876 farm laborers composed of men who did not even rent land. Equally significant was the increasing tendency to the operating of large farms by capitalists with the hired labor. Of farms under cultivation, extending from one hundred to five hundred acres, there were nearly a million and a half—1,416,618, to give the exact number—owned largely by capitalists and cultivated by laborers. [Footnote: Tenth Census, Statistics of Agriculture: 28.]
Phillips, who had superior opportunities for getting at the real facts, and whose volume upon the subject issued at the time is well worthy of consideration, thus commented upon the census returns:
It will thus be seen that of the 7,670,493 persons in our country engaged in agriculture, there are 1,024,601 who pay rent to persons not cultivating the soil; 1,508,828 capitalist or speculating owners, who own the soil and employ laborers; 804,522 of well-to-do farmers who hire part of their work or employ laborers, and 670,944 who may be said to actually cultivate the soil they own: the rest are hired workers.
Phillips goes on to remark:
Another fact must be borne in mind, that a large number of the 2,984,306 farmers who own land are in debt for it to the money lenders. From the writer's observation it is probable that forty per cent, of them are so deeply in debt as to pay a rent in interest. This squeezing process is going on at the rate of eight and ten per cent., and in most cases can terminate in but one way. [Footnote: "Labor, Land and Law": 353. It is difficult to get reliable statistics on the number of mortgages on farms, and on the number of farm tenants. The U.S. Industrial Commission estimated, in 1902, that fifty per cent, of the homesteads in Eastern Minnesota were mortgaged. Although admitting that such a condition had been general, it represented in its Final Report that a large number of mortgages in certain States had been paid off. According to the "Political Science Quarterly" (Vol. xi, No. 4, 1896) the United States Census of 1890 showed a marked increase, not only absolutely, but relatively in the number of farm tenants. It can hardly be doubted that farm tenantry is rapidly increasing and will under the influence of various causes increase still more.]