REFLEX INFLUENCE OF A. M. A.
FROM ADDRESS BY REV. S. L. BLAKE, D.D.
The direct increase to the wealth of the country, in diminishing the number of mere consumers, and increasing the number of actual producers and property-holders, puts the business world largely in debt to this society.
A few figures will help your understanding of the case. In twenty-one years this society has spent $5,543,636.03—a yearly average of $263,772.19. In seventeen years, from 1863 to 1880, from not owning a single dollar’s worth of property of any sort available for taxation, these people have come to hold property taxed for $100,000,000, as appears from Southern tax-bills, which show no respect of color—an average rate of increase from nothing, of $5,882,352.94 a year. This is a yearly increase greater than the whole amount spent by this society. That is, this society has spent $1, and these people, from absolute pauperism, have come into possession of over $21 of taxable property. These facts answer the question whether the colored man can take care of himself, and show that the labors of this society have a cash value which can easily be computed.
There is still another phase of the cash value of the labors of this society, as related to the productive wealth of the country. Here this society touches and increases our material prosperity. I refer to a more equable distribution of ownership in the soil. Surely no one can deny that to change five or six millions of people from paupers to property-holders, produces a very material effect upon the prosperity of the State.
I believe that it is a settled canon of political economy that a nation’s wealth is in its soil. Where there are but few land-owners, and the tillers of the soil are tenants, wealth must be in the hands of the few, and comparative if not absolute poverty in the hands of the many. To this state of things belong social classes, as widely separated from each other as continents. It goes without saying that landed monopoly and general prosperity of the people do not go together. I am no advocate of communism; but I take the ground, and I believe it can be held, that the same amount of property, somewhat evenly distributed among the people of a country, adds more to its actual productive wealth and material prosperity, than the same amount of money would do, held in the hands of a few, who constitute an aristocracy of wealth and of blood. Of course, in every state, some men must be vastly more wealthy than others. But a comfortable competence in one’s hands makes him entirely independent of his more wealthy neighbor.
It is among the proofs of the increasing material prosperity of this country, that the average size of farms has decreased from 199 acres in 1860 to 134 acres in 1880; and that the amount of capital invested in farms exceeds the money invested in railroads, and in manufacturing, including supplies, by over $2,000,000,000. Gradually this vast preponderance of wealth is being more equably distributed among the people. The plantation system, previous to the war, gives way to the small farm, tilled and owned in many cases by the former slaves. Take a single case. Liberty County, Georgia, in 1860, was mostly taken up by large plantations. There were but 48 farms, “of from three acres to one hundred acres each.” In 1880 the county was almost entirely owned by colored people, and there were 1,500 farms. This is an illustration of the yielding of landed monopoly and aristocracy to popular ownership in the soil, and to a more general and evenly diffused prosperity. The average size of farms in fifteen slave States has been reduced from over 368 acres in 1860 to a trifle over 149 acres in 1880, over 50 per cent. If you precipitate upon the population of a country 1,000,000 citizens, who may become land-holders, you have struck a heavy blow at landed monopoly, and taken a long stride toward increase of material prosperity.