In 1900, 10,500,000 people were engaged in agriculture in America, or 35.7 per cent. of the population; as over against 37.7 in 1890 and 44.3 in 1880. Of these 10,500,000, 5,700,000 were owners, renters, or overseers, or 56 per cent., and only 4,500,000 were actual farm laborers; and more than half of these, or 2,350,000, were members of the family, leaving only some 2,000,000 actual agricultural wage-earners, or employable agricultural laborers. Five-eighths of these were under twenty-five years of age, and of the white regular workers only one-tenth were over thirty-five years of age. This shows how unstable is the foundation of our agricultural prosperity, the chief asset of plenty and contentment of our country. Mr. Get-Rich-Quick has moved on to the shifting and more exciting opportunities of the cities, where poor human nature, aided and abetted by weak philanthropy, and demagogic fishing for votes by eleemosynary legislation, provides him with a mild form of riotous living, and a fatted calf of doles in case of accident, sickness, penury, or old age.
In our American cities of over 8,000 inhabitants the increase in population from 1790 to 1900 has been from 3.4 per cent. to 33 per cent. In cities of 2,500 and over the increase from 1880 to 1900 has been from 29.3 per cent. to 40.2 per cent. In the State of New York the farming population is smaller than ever before, and in parts of New England it is smaller than one hundred years ago. In 1909 there were 15,000 deserted farms with a total of 1,130,000 acres. The average size of farms in the United States in 1850 was 212 acres; in 1890, 121 acres. Wages in the reaping season on fruit, grain, and cotton farms are enormous, running to four and five dollars a day. We are behind every country in Europe except Russia, in our agricultural methods. Some day the American people will discover, may it not be too late, that the tall talk and highfalutin boastings of the politicians and alien journalists in their midst do nothing to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before.
Germany may not have solved this problem, indeed no nation which offers undue legislative alleviation for human frailty will ever solve it, but at least she has not shirked the problem, and presents for our enlightenment a scheme in full and smooth working order.
In dealing with German problems it is fair to give examples where her methods have been wholly and entirely successful. The man who does not know one tree or shrub from another cannot travel in trains, motor-cars, or afoot without remarking the neatness, symmetry, and the flourishing condition of the forests. In these matters Germany so far surpasses us that we may be said to be merely in a kindergarten stage of development. As early as 1783 a German traveller, Johann David Schoepf, was distressed to see the waste of valuable wood in America. He tells of a furnace in New Jersey which exhausted a forest of nearly 20,000 acres in twelve to fifteen years, and goes on to prophesy the grave danger to America unless coal is discovered and used instead of wood.
The public forests in America contain about nine per cent. of the total land area and about twenty-five per cent. of the forest area of the country. In Germany the state owns about 40 per cent. of the forests, and nearly 70 per cent. of the forest area is under state control. The total forest area of the empire is 34,569,800 acres, and two-thirds bear pine, larch, and red and white fir. In a recent year the Federal States made a net profit of $38,250,000 from public lands and forests, and the entire profit from the German forests was estimated at $110,000,000. When one remembers that Germany is less than the size of Texas, and that from her forests alone, in one year, she received an income equal to more than one-tenth of our total national expenditure for that same year, the fact of our childish wastefulness is brought home to us, and makes a patriot feel that a Gifford Pinchot should be given a free hand. I can only write of the subject as one technically entirely ignorant, but that Germany is a university of forestry is not only attested by the demand for her teachers in India, and in America, and elsewhere in the world, but by the condition of the forests themselves all over Germany, which no traveller, from America at any rate, can fail to notice without surprise and delight.
Germany, like the rest of us, has been obliged to face the various social problems that arise from original sin, but which vote-getters are pleased to ascribe to industrial progress. In our country, with a population of some thirty to the square mile, while in the kingdom of Saxony the density of the population is 830.6 to the square mile, it is hard to believe that we suffer from overcrowding so much as from overindulgence, wastefulness, and fussy legislation. None the less, we have 42 institutions for the feeble-minded, 115 schools and homes for the deaf and blind, 350 hospitals for the insane, 1,200 refuge houses, 1,300 prisons, 1,500 hospitals, and 2,500 almshouses. We have 2,000,000 annually who are cared for in homes and hospitals, 300,000 insane and feeble-minded, 160,000 blind or deaf, 80,000 prisoners, and 100,000 paupers in almshouses and out, and we spend each year about $100,000,000 in taking care of them. We are as wasteful and careless in these matters as we have been until very lately in our forestry methods.
In the early days of the empire Germany undertook to deal with these social problems. The German Empire took over some of the principles of socialism, but retained, and retains absolutely, the power of applying those principles. Bismarck himself admitted that his advocacy of the industrial insurance laws was selfish. “My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.” Whatever else may have resulted, discontent, whether well-founded or not, is not now under discussion, has not been lessened. In 1912 more than one-half of the electors voted “discontented” as over against the less than one-half who voted “contented.” The mass of the people may be better clothed, better fed, better housed, better cared for in sickness and in old age, than formerly, but they are not satisfied. No state can go much further than Germany has gone along the lines of state interference, guidance, and control of the personal affairs of its people, and nothing is more surprising about the whole matter than the general acceptance in America and in England of such legislation as having proved altogether successful. I doubt if any intelligent German considers these various pension schemes as altogether successful. I can vouch for it that many German statesmen make no such claims in private, whatever they may say in public.
Some of the barren figures, needing no comment, are of interest in this connection. The cost of insurance in Germany has risen to over $500,000 a day, the total cost of state insurance exceeding $250,000,000 a year at the present time, a fairly heavy tax upon small employers. In 1909, of 422,076 decisions by the industrial unions, 76,352 were appealed against, and of the 100,000 arbitration judgments, 22,794 were appealed against. So difficult is it to settle to the claimant’s satisfaction the amount of salve necessary for his particular wound when, as is true in these cases, the salve is a grant of money for a longer or shorter period!
In 1886 there were, roughly, 100,000 accidents reported and 10,000 compensated, but as they became more thoroughly acquainted with the game, the figures rose in 1908 to 662,321 accidents and 142,965 compensations.
The vast increase of the claims for trifling injuries is shown by the fact that in twenty years from 1888 to 1908, despite the increase of the total compensation from $1,475,000 to $38,715,000, the average compensation per accident fell from $58.50 to $38.83. In the two years 1907 to 1909 the number of members of those state-insured increased by 380,819, while the days of sickness increased by 26,219,632! The cost of sickness insurance alone rose from $42,895,000 in 1900 to $83,640,000 in 1909. The Workmen’s Compensation Act in England costs, for management, commission, legal and medical fees, $20,000,000 a year, while the compensation paid out was $13,500,000. The insurance companies calculate that for every $500 of compensation, the employers have paid $750!