From the foregoing table it will be seen that while during the previous decade relative tenantry declined slightly in several States, the tide has since turned. Though the Southern States generally show the greatest proportion of tenants, the greatest percentage of increase is revealed in the Border, Northern, and Western States. Tenants operate 62.4 per cent of all the farms of Mississippi, 61 per cent of those of South Carolina. But while the former is a growth since 1880 from 43.8 per cent, and the latter from 50.3 per cent, Oklahoma (the comparison in this single instance is with 1890) increased the percentage of its tenant-operated farms from seven-tenths of 1 per cent to 21 per cent. Washington doubled its percentage, Montana and Utah very nearly so. Nearly one-third of the farms of New Jersey are tenant farms, and more than one-third of those of Kansas and Nebraska. Each of these three States doubled its relative percentage of tenant farmers for the twenty-year period. Even in New York the proportion has grown since 1880 from 16.5 to 23.9 per cent. As marked as is the showing, the whole situation is not revealed by the figures, for the term “owners” in the reports includes “farms operated by individuals who own a part of the land and rent the remainder from others,” and “farms operated under the joint direction and by the united labor of two or more individuals, one owning the farm or a part of it, and the other or others owning no part but receiving for supervision or labor a share of the products.”
This remarkable growth of tenantry would be considered, in any other than our own complacent days, as an alarming, even an appalling fact. So blithely and for so long a time have the changes been rung upon the alleged fact of independent ownership that everybody, including professors of political economy, assumes its truth. But even when its baselessness is clearly shown we shall hear little of an alarmist nature from our publicists and teachers. Rather it may be expected that their pronouncements will change with the changing times, and that we shall soon hear reiterated gratulations on the development of tenantry. Is not the humble tenant’s security greater, are not his troubles less? Need he worry over taxes, foreclosures, and the like? Not at all; and besides—not the least of considerations to our paternalistic moulders of opinion—there is much reason for satisfaction in the fact that, having no land to mortgage, he will not be led into wildly prodigal habits of life by a too ready recourse to the money-lender.
Considering the growth of tenantry, the increasing migration to Canada, the flocking of rural residents into the cities, and the frequent outright abandonment of farms in several sections of the country, the unsophisticated onlooker may naturally wonder at the tales of agricultural prosperity which from time to time appear in public print. Mr. Draper, in the article previously mentioned, speculates somewhat ingeniously over the financial returns due the farmer for his crop for the present year. The figures are certainly imposing when looked at as totals. The wheat crop will sum up 700,500,000 bushels, and each bushel will sell for 60 cents, making the net value $580,100,000—a rather curious result, by the way, not obtainable by any of the ordinary processes of mathematics. The corn crop is to bring $776,985,300, and the remaining crops follow, with large values attached.
But reduced to individual earnings, values of farm products (according to the census, products other than those fed to live stock) reveal a rather meagre diffusion of prosperity. Of the 5,739,657 farms in the United States, 1,319,856 are listed in the census as hay and grain farms, for the reason that hay and grain comprise 40 per cent of their total products. The average size of these hay and grain farms is 159.3 acres, and the average value of this product per acre in 1899 was $4.77. The number of miscellaneous farms is 1,059,416, with an average acreage of 106.8, and a product value of $4.12. Live-stock farms number 1,564,714, with an average acreage of 226.9 and a product value of $3.47. Thus the average productive yield of 70 per cent of all the farms and 80 per cent of all the farm land in the nation ranges from $3.47 to $4.77 per acre. Flowers and plants, it may be noted for comparison, yield the comfortable return of $431.83 per acre; but their effect on the general census is but slight, since the average product value of all farms is but $4.47 per acre. But let no one suppose that all this munificent sum goes to the farmer. He pays 43 cents per acre for labor and nearly 7 cents per acre for fertilizers. The net income is thus $3.97 per acre.
The size of farms is increasing, though actual agriculture is probably confined to smaller holdings. The average was 136.5 acres in 1890; it is now 146.6 acres. The tendency varies in different parts of the country. Nebraska increases her average from 190.1 acres in 1890 to 246.1 acres in 1900. Kansas shows almost identical figures, while the New England States show little change, and the Southern States generally show reduced averages. The relation of size of farm to kind of tenure is, however, the main point, and here one discovers matter for reflection. Farms operated by cash tenants have 102.7 acres apiece, by owners 134.1, by managers 1514.3. The growth of manorial estates is dimly revealed in these figures, and there is no need to doubt the census bulletin’s reserved admission that farms operated by managers are believed to be constantly increasing.
The subject of the changing status of the farmer—a change which involves his ultimate reduction to a sixteenth-century level—is too large to receive adequate treatment in these pages. By all considerations it deserves the space of a generous volume. For present purposes there remains to be said that even where apparent ownership is retained by the working farmer, effective ownership is determined in other quarters. He is the joint tenant of the farm implement trusts, of the new harvester trust, of the produce trusts which fix the value of his products, of the railroad trusts which fix the rate of transportation to the market, and in the arid West of the water trusts. Thus, even though he boasts the possession of a title-deed to his land, the holding is in reality of the nature of a fief, held at the mercy of several superiors; and the tithes which he pays, though less formally levied and exacted than were the redevances of the mediæval peasant, are as many and well-nigh as burdensome. And he must pay or go; for there is no remission from his superiors, as in olden days, on account of drouth, floods, locusts, or murrain.
II
With the decline of the petty trades, the growth of the combinations, and the concentration in fewer hands of the machinery of production, the subordination of the wage-earner becomes more certain and more fixed. If ever he were a free agent,—in the sense and to the degree that any one in human society can be free,—the day is passed. Through agencies constantly augmenting and extending, he is “cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in,” to a narrowing circle of possible efforts. Divorced from the land and from the tools of production, he can live only by accepting such wages and conditions as are offered him; and the terms are always such that the kernel of his product goes to some other man, while the husks and the tares remain his own portion. The patronizing orators of Labor Day and of campaign times sometimes delight to symbolize him as a sturdy Gulliver, though it needs little reflection to see that it is the Gulliver of Brobdingnag, and not that of Lilliput, that more correctly figures his present status. The mass of current tendencies tends to fix him as a dependent—a unit of a lower order in a series of gradations running up to the Big Men. “The corporation,” writes Mr. Richmond,[4] “holds of the State, and its officers hold of the corporation, and their retainers, managers, and servants all hold the tenure of their employment from their superiors in office, from the highest to the lowest.” But whether corporation, or partnership, or individual, employs the laborer’s services, his status is practically the same. Trade-unions and other labor societies tend to modify that dependence; and occasionally social legislation, when it runs the fierce gantlet of the courts, exerts a further modification. But it is coming to be recognized that there is a limit, perhaps now nearly attained, beyond which the labor societies can exert no influence; and as for social legislation, as will be shown farther along, it has certainly reached its culmination.
To the natural causes making for the laborer’s subordination have been added in recent years certain conscious and deliberate forces. There is a collective pressure brought to bear upon his wages; there is a collective antagonism maintained against his unions; there is a growing movement in the direction of holding him for the term of his profitable service to the company or corporation by which he is employed, and there is a judicial tendency to pretend still to regard him, despite his changing status, as an economically free agent, able to do what he wills, and to protect himself from all injustice.