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.]
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.