Sunday Group of Roumanian Steel Workers, Youngstown, O.
Sunday Roumanians, Youngstown, O.
THE NEW IMMIGRATION AND THE HIGH COST OF LIVING
Between 1900 and 1910, although population grew twenty-one per cent., the output of the ten principal crops of the country increased only nine per cent. Between 1899 and 1911 the value of the average acre's output of such crops increased seventy per cent., while its power to purchase the things the farmer buys was greater by forty-two per cent. There has been a general upheaval of prices, to be sure, but the price of farm produce has risen much faster and farther than the price of other commodities. This is "the high cost of living," and it is immigration that has made this imp shoot up faster in the United States than anywhere else.
As long as good land lasted, our Government stimulated agriculture by presenting a quarter-section to whoever would undertake to farm wild land. This bounty overdid farming, until, in the middle of the nineties, the cost of living had reached a minimum. With the ending of free land, the upward turn was bound to come, but the change was made more dramatic by the inpouring of ten millions of immigrants without the knowledge, the means, or the inclination to engage in farming. Among us there is one American white farmer for fourteen American whites, one Scandinavian farmer for eight Scandinavians, one German farmer for eleven Germans, one Irish farmer for forty Irish; but it takes 130 Poles, Hungarians, or Italians in this country to furnish one farmer. Failing to contribute their due quota to the production of food, these late-comers have ruptured the equilibrium between field and mill, and made the high cost of living a burning question. Just as the homestead policy overstimulated the growth of farms, the new immigration has overstimulated the growth of factories.
IMMIGRANTS AND AGRICULTURE
Nevertheless, certain of the South Europeans who are upon the soil have something to show American farmers facing the problems of intensive agriculture. Italians are teaching their neighbors how to extract three crops a year from a soil already nourishing orchard or vineyard. The Portuguese raise vegetables in their walnut groves, grow currants between the rows of trees in the orchard, and beans between the currant rows. They know how to prevent the splitting of their laden fruit-trees by inducing a living brace to grow between opposite branches. The blackbeetle problem they solve by planting tomato slips inclosed in paper. From the slopes looking out on the Adriatic the Dalmatian brings a horticultural cunning which the American fruit-grower should be eager to acquire.