THE STATE OF THE FARMING POPULATION.
The conditions of the farming population, along with that of the working class, steadily grew worse. In the hope of improving their condition large numbers migrated from the Eastern States, and a constant influx of agriculturists poured in from Europe.
A comparatively few of the whole were able to get land direct from the Government. Naturally the course of this extensive migration followed the path of transportation, that is to say, of the railroads. This was exactly what the railroad corporations had anticipated. As a rule the migrating farmers found the railroads or cattlemen already in possession of many of the best lands. To give a specific idea of how vast and widespread were the railroad holdings in the various States, this tabulation covering the years up to 1883 will suffice: In the States of Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi about 9,000,000 acres in all; in Wisconsin, 3,553,865 acres; Missouri, 2,605,251 acres; Arkansas, 2,613,631 acres; Illinois, 2,595,053 acres; Iowa, 4,181,929 acres; Michigan, 3,355,943 acres; Minnesota, 9,830,450 acres; Nebraska, 6,409,376 acres; Colorado, 3,000,000 acres; the State of Washington, 11,700,000 acres; New Mexico, 11,500,000 acres; in the Dakotas, 8,000,000 acres; Oregon, 5,800,000 acres; Montana, 17,000,000 acres; California, 16,387,000; Idaho, 1,500,000, and Utah, 1,850,000. [Footnote: "The Public Domain," House Ex. Doc. No. 47, Third Session, Forty-sixth Congress: 273.]
Prospective farmers had to pay the railroads exorbitant prices for land. Very often they had not sufficient funds; a mortgage or two would be signed; and if the farmer had a bad season or two, and could no longer pay the interest, foreclosure would result. But whether crops were good or bad, the American farmer constantly had to compete in the grain markets of the world with the cheap labor of India and Russia. And inexorably, East or West, North or South, he was caught between a double fire.
On the one hand, in order to compete with the immense capitalist farms gradually developing, he had to give up primitive implements and buy the most improved agricultural machines. For these he was charged five and six times the sum it cost the manufacturers to make and market them. Usually if he could not pay for them outright, the manufacturers took out a mortgage on his farm. Large numbers of these mortgages were foreclosed.
In addition, the time had passed when the farmer made his own clothes and many other articles. For everything that he bought he had to pay excessive prices. He, even more than the industrial working classes, had to pay an enormous manufacturer's profit, and additionally the high freight railroad rate.
On the other hand, the great capitalist agencies directly dealing with the crops—the packing houses, the gambling cotton and produce exchanges—actually owned, by a series of manipulations, a large proportion of his crops before they were out of the ground. These crops were sold to the working class at exorbitant prices. The small farmer labored incessantly, only to find himself getting poorer. It served political purpose well to describe glowingly the farmer's prosperity; but the greater crops he raised, the greater the profit to the railroad companies and to various other divisions of the capitalist class. His was the labor and worry; they gathered in the financial harvest.