FARM FENCKS. 



245 



But it will be asked what of the movements already' inaugurated 

 for doing away with fences in some of our American communities, 

 notably in Kansas and in several of tlie States of the South? If 

 we examine the conditions of each case we shall find them special 

 and by no means applicable, or at least not found equally pressing 

 in other States. In Kansas it is a conflict between the herder and 

 the cropper, the former generally a large owner with extensive 

 capital and large herds, and in many cases the owner of herds with 

 no land at all. This was destructive to the small farmers, generally 

 poor, in a land where fencing with wood is out of the question, and 

 all fencing costly. In about half the counties of Kansas the Herd 

 law is in force, but I find among the best authorities many opinions 

 as to the transient nature of the law, and the belief that there will 

 be a general return to the old system with the advanced development 

 of the State. It is only popular as an expedient in the newest 

 settled counties. 



In the South the conditions are still more anomalous. A great 

 change has come over the agricultural systems of the South under 

 free labor, and this constitutes an essential feature in the fence 

 question. The old plantations have gone, and the subdivision of 

 land came all at once. In Alabama the forty-one thousand farms 

 of 1850 became in 1880 one hundred and forty thousand. In 

 Georgia fifty-two thousand fiirms have grown in thirty years to one 

 hundred and thirty-eight thousand. (I employ only the round 

 figures of the late U. S. Census Report.) And the cliange is 

 equally marked in all the Southern States. The owners and tenants 

 in the new holdings are poor and cannot at once build suflficient 

 fences. But the new farmers, once slaves, will have their live stock, 

 and the poorest of them cherish pride in a mule, a shote, and a few 

 cattle of their own. So that the farm neighborhoods of the South 

 found themselves swarming with loose domestic animals, and all 

 seeking in Common law the remedy, making ever}^ man responsible 

 for his own beasts. This is not doing awa}- with fences. In the 

 law in Viiginia, where the movement began as long ago as 1856, 

 counties and larger or smaller territories were allowed, on vote of 

 their electors, to do away with fences bj' enclosing the whole circuit 

 of such tracts or territories with a legal fence, gates to be main- 

 tained at all roads entering the same, and within such limits the 

 Common law rule prevails. New England will not soon fence her 

 villages and counties in such fashion, but her laws have always 



