price of land. In short, the average value of land per acre rose from $15.57 in 1900 to $32.40 in 1910, or one hundred and eight per cent. In one decade, therefore, the value of the farm land in the United States was more than doubled. Obviously the real estate market in its present unorganized condition offers opportunity for speculative gains rivalling and even exceeding those of the stock exchange or other organized exchanges. Is the farmer the beneficiary or the victim of high-priced land and of land speculation? The farmer who depends for a living on the proceeds of his farming is clearly the victim, since it is rapidly becoming more difficult to become a land owner. An increase in the number of mortgages accompanied by a decrease in tenancy would show a healthy movement of renters becoming owners. But such a movement is lacking. On the other hand, an increase in mortgages, accompanied by an increase of tenancy, shows an unmistakable movement of land ownership out of the hands of the farmers into the hands of absentee landlords. This movement is unhappily upon us.

Commercial Value vs. Market Value. -The selling price of the products of the land determine the commercial value of the land. When land sells for a price in excess of this value it has a market value out of line with its commercial value and may be said to be overcapitalized. This situation often

be due to various causes. But whatever the are bad for the would-be land-owning farmer.

exists, and may cause, the results Edwin A. Pratt

in his book on "The Transition in Agriculture," gives us a striking statement of the case from his own observation in England. Says Pratt:

"Looking in the first place at the price which the would-be peasant proprietor must pay for his land independently of legal charges, it is certain that the English agriculturist who desires to purchase a small holding in the open market labors under special disadvantages. It is not alone that he has to compete with a number of others possessed of similar aspirations, but various causes have combined to give to much of the land in this country-more, perhaps than in any other country a market value which is in excess of its commercial value that is to say, its value when it is wanted for the production of commodities for sale. This is especially the case in regard to land which might be utilized for residential purposes for the sake of the social advantages afforded by the ownership of an estate or in the interests of sport. Not only do established country families seek to increase their properties, for one reason or another, by incorporating therein any bit of freehold they can secure in the immediate neighborhood, but the market value may be kept above the commercial value by reason of the fact that every Englishman, more or less, who has prospered, thinks it incumbent on him to set up his 'place' in the country, if he should not have one already. In either case a higher price would be forthcoming than could be afforded by a cultivator who desired the land as a means of obtaining a living thereon. Still more do these considera

OVERCAPITALIZED LAND BAD THING

29

tions apply in the neighborhood of a town or of a village not too far from a railway station-that is to say, in precisely those localities which the small holder who wanted to start market gardening, or some other such business, would find the most desirable for his purpose. Here he might have to compete with the retired professional man, merchant, or tradesman, who, though unable to buy a large estate, wished for a 'bit of land,' which he could either build on or, at least, feel a pride in owning, and for which he is not disposed to look too closely at the price, assuming he finds what suits his fancy. So to begin with, the would-be small owner, standing as a solitary unit might agree to buy land at a higher price than he ought to pay from a commercial standpoint-even if he had the money. But he has not got the money. He possesses a certain sum, and this the seller of the land agrees to accept, the remainder being left on mortgage."

This situation leads Pratt to the conclusion that tenancy at a fair rent is better than ownership at an overcapitalized valuation. His words are: "Looking at the matter from the point of view of first principles, I should say the purchase provided tenancy on satisfactory lines can be secured instead is the more undesirable because the small holder should be able to do better with his money. Farming as a business must be run on business lines, and there ought to be greater profit from capital placed in a business, with the possibilities of a more or less frequent turn-over, than from capital locked up in land that is wanted for cultivation, especially in land bought at, as I have said, more than its commercial valuation."

Overcapitalized land is a bad thing for the farmers themselves, as the foregoing discussion indicates. It is likewise a bad thing for the wage-earning class. The outstanding economic fact in our past history has been the abundance of cheap, fertile land. And this "free" land as long as it lasted-was the one great force tending to maintain the high rate of American wages. Truly did Winthrop sense the situation when he wrote in 1645: "Our children's children will hardly see this great continent filled with people, so that our servants will still desire freedom to plant for themselves, and not stay but for verie great wages." In a similar vein wrote a royal official of New York in 1723: "North America containing a vast tract of land, everyone is able to procure a piece of land at an inconsiderable rate, and therefore is fond to set up for himself rather than work for hire. This makes labor continue very dear...”

Earnings from "watered-stock" and earnings from the "unearned increment" in land value are in essence the same, and are indeed twin evils. Each man ought to reap where he sows and what he sows, and no more. How much profit, then, is the farmer entitled to? A fair answer to this question is contained in the

2x

federal government's "Weekly News Letter to Crop Correspondents," in these words: 2

"The county agent is a part of a great agricultural movement. This movement has for its ultimate purpose the building up of a country life that shall be wholesome, attractive, cultured, efficient and profitable. There are many sections of our country to-day that have one or more of these conditions, but the sections where all are found in happy unison are comparatively few. The desire of those who are thinking on rural problems is that rural communities everywhere shall be wholesome, attractive, and cultured, and that each individual shall receive a fair reward for the labor done and the capital invested. In proportion as agriculture is made profitable will the community become attractive, cultured, and a place wholesome and desirable to live in.

"Just what is meant by a profitable agriculture? Simply this: There shall be a reasonable return on the capital invested in farming and a reasonable return for the farmer's labor and managerial ability. A farmer, like any other man in any other business, is entitled to just what he earns and no more; but what he earns should be sufficient to give him and his family some of the more essential conveniences of modern life, time for study, some recreation, and opportunity for education of his children. With some money in his pocket the farmer will support the church, place conveniences in his house, magazines and literature on the sitting-room table, and send his children to the best schools with very little outside prompting."

THE "BACK TO THE LAND " MOVEMENT

An ideal held by a great many people in this Republic is a sturdy and substantial class of farmers, owning and tilling their own small farms. The farm is pictured in song and story as the true home of health and happiness as well as the very foundation of wealth and independence. Doubtless many of our forefathers shared the opinions of Jefferson when he fondly looked upon agrarian democracy as the goal of the new Republic; when he considered a large wage-earning class as well as a large commercial class (depending upon the "casualties and caprices of customers") as full of danger, corruption and subservience. To use Jefferson's own words: "Generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is in the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption." As to a wage-earning class: “Let our workshops remain in Europe The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the human body I consider the class of artificers as panderers of vice, and the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned." What would be Jefferson's opinion of his country to-day? Just after our Civil War the slogan, "Forty Acres and a Mule," was taken up by the people of the North and the carpet-bagger of the South, as the ideal solution of the negro problem in its economic aspects.

...

To-day from press and pulpit, from publicists and legislators, comes the cry, "Back to the Land." Now that seventy million of our people live in villages and cities, and only thirty million live in the open country, the problem of the "small farm," of the "closer settlement" is becoming a very interesting one. The cry is, "Back to the Land." The drift is away from the land. The situation is perplexing. What should be the attitude of the honest patriot towards this condition? What have other peoples in other lands found out about this question of the small farm?

The question of the big farm versus the small farm was a very hotly debated question in England three-fourths of a century ago. Good farming must perish with the breaking up of large

farms, contended one side; not so, replied the other side. One British writer, a friend of the small farm owner, stated the matter concretely as follows: "Our agricultural writers tell us, indeed, that laborers in agriculture are much better off as farm servants than they would be as small proprietors. We have only the master's word for this. Ask the servant. The colonists told us the same thing of their slaves. If property is a good and desirable thing, I suspect the smallest quantity of it is good and desirable; and that state of society in which it is most widely diffused is the best constituted."

Norway is cited as an example where peasant proprietors are of oldest date and most numerous in proportion to population, and where as a consequence social and economic conditions are of the best. Concerning the effects of peasant proprietorship on the continent, the same writer goes on to say:1

"If we listen to the large farmer, the scientific agriculturist, the political economist, good farming must perish with large farms; the very idea that good farming can exist unless on large farms cultivated with great capital, they hold to be absurd. Draining, manuring, economical arrangement, cleaning the land, regular rotations, valuable stock and implements, all belong exclusively to large farms, worked by large capital, and by hired labor. This reads very well; but if we raise our eyes from their books to their fields, and coolly compare what we see in the best districts farmed in large farms with what we see in the best districts farmed in small farms, we see, and there is no blinking the fact, better crops on the ground in Flanders, East Friesland, Holstein, in short, on the whole line of the arable land of equal quality on the continent from the Sound to Calais, than we see on the line of the British coast opposite to this line, and in the same latitudes, from the Firth of Forth all round to Dover. Minute labor on small portions of arable ground gives evidently, in equal soils and climate, a superior productiveness, where these small portions belong in property, as in Flanders, Holland, Friesland, and Ditmarsch in Holstein, to the farmer. It is not pretended by our agricultural writers, that our large farmers, even in Berwickshire, Roxburghshire, or the Lothians approach to the garden-like cultivation, attention to manures, drainage, and clean state of the land, or in productiveness from a small space of soil not originally rich, which distinguish the small or their system. In the best-farmed parish in Scotland or England, more land is wasted in the corners and borders of the fields of large farms, in the roads through them, unnecessarily wide because they are bad, and bad because they are wide, in neglected commons, waste spots, useless belts and clumps of sorry trees, and such unproductive areas, than would maintain the poor of the parish, if they were all laid together and cultivated. But large capital applied to farming is of course only applied to the very best soils of a country. It cannot touch the small unproductive spots which require more time and labor to fertilize them than is consistent with a quick return of capital. But although hired time and labor cannot be applied beneficially to such cultivation, the owner's time and labor may. He is working for no higher returns at first from his land than a bare living. But in the course of generations fertility and value are produced; a better living, and even very improved processes of husbandry,

1 Laing, Notes of a Traveler, p. 299 et seq.

the small farmers of Flanders,