FOOD AND LAND TENURE. 575 



from adopting methods formerly described by Governor Wise of 

 Virginia, as that of slavery, when he said that 'the white men skinned 

 the nigger and the nigger skinned the land/ There is an element of , 

 skinning in every system relating to land not born of perfect freedom. 

 Perfect freedom in the purchase and rental of American land leads to 

 constant improvement. 



Under the freedom of sale which prevails in the United States, with 

 the facility of mortgage loans which permits the poor man to use the 

 capital of the rich to secure for himself a farm, there will always be 

 a large mortgage debt in the rural sections of the United States. 

 That debt marks, as a rule, the upward movement of the poor laborer 

 on the road of farm ownership. One class of men incur debt for land 

 purchased or for improvements, and pay off the same, and as they 

 retire in old age another and younger set repeat the process of rising 

 to independence by the same road. The relative number of those who 

 have attained their goal and of those on the way may be seen by the 

 following figures : 



Of the farms in the twelve States named, about sixty to sixty- 

 five per cent, are now free from mortgage debt, and thirty-five to forty 

 per cent, are mortgaged. The debt on the mortgaged farms does not 

 exceed thirty-five per cent, of their value, and the total mortgage debt of 

 the States is not in excess of about twelve to fifteen per cent, of the 

 whole farm value. 



Under these conditions the area of land devoted to the several grain 

 crops diminishes in ratio to that given to other crops, varied farming 

 taking the place of the all-wheat or all-corn system. But by the intro- 

 duction of intensive farming there is a steady improvement and in- 

 crease in the quantity and the quality of the crops derived from a given 

 area of soil. The wheat needed for home use will keep even with popu- 

 lation for many years without any increase in area. 



The most potent agency in this revolution in agriculture may be 

 but little known in Europe, especially in England. I refer to the so- 

 called Agricultural Experiment Stations, which have grown in a 

 rather singular manner, of which no very definite record has yet been 

 given. The general government appropriates annually $720,000, and 

 the State governments $440,000, more or less, in addition, to be ex- 

 pended by the Agricultural Experiment Stations, under the general 

 supervision of a special department in the Department of Agriculture, 

 of which Professor A. C. True is now the director. But the general 

 government has no very definite control over the expenditure of this 

 money. The stations are established by the several States. They are 

 now thirty-six in number — one in nearly every State; two or three in 

 some of them. Each one is under the direction of a trained student of 

 the science of dealing with land as an instrument or tool of produc- 



