248 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



generally. The lien, at least in some states, contains a clause reqiiiring 

 the farmer to enter into a similar agreement the next year with the 

 deficit charged against him if he does not succeed in paying out the 

 first year's account. 



The iniquity of such a system is exceeded only by the suffering of 

 the farmer under it. To observe its operation makes plain the ground 

 for the Biblical injunction given three thousand years ago to an agri- 

 cultural people against usury. And the pathos of the lien farmer is 

 that he is always only twelve months from freedom. Better that he 

 should eat but one coarse meal a day and wear his cheap clothes to the 

 last frazzle of decency, and by one unremitted struggle break his 

 chains. 



This lien system goes far to account for the amazing fact a few 

 years ago of the southern farmer's persistently planting a full acreage 

 of cotton in the face of an already glutted market. Those who then 

 berated him for his folly little understood his predicament. For the 

 southern cotton farmer, cotton is the only money crop; but for it 

 there is absolutely certain sale, for there exists from the field to the 

 factory a market unexcelled for its thorough and sensitive organization 

 in the commerce of the world. Government bonds can sooner fail of 

 a purchaser than can a bale of cotton. When a lien merchant sells 

 goods with cotton as security, he sells practically for gold paid in hand 

 and by the same act invests his gold at an enormously profitable divi- 

 dend. If cotton has fallen in price, the merchant requires the farmer 

 to increase his acreage, as more bales are necessary to equal a given 

 sum; and as the farmer's necessities do not diminish with the price 

 of his product, he submits; and so we behold the paradox of men's 

 planting more and more of a certain crop for the sole reason that to 

 plant it is becoming less and less desirable. 



The effect produced upon the character of a people by rack rent is 

 well known; v/here the tenant promises a rent equaling or exceeding 

 the surplus product of the land above what is necessary to keep him 

 alive, he has no inducement to good farming, as the total surplus pro- 

 duced will be taken from him whether it be great or small. His 

 fields present the most miserable appearance. The same is true of the 

 farmer whose lien just suffices to secure on credit the bare necessities 

 of food, clothing and farming material. Not infrequently he even neg- 

 lects to harvest his crop, and the merchant has to send his own men to 

 pick it from the field. 



The hard times from 1891 to 1896 were of incalculable benefit to 

 many southern farmers. The terrible experience of usury, depressed 

 prices and industrial peonage led many to resolve to be free from 

 the lien system; and the enforced economy of those years taught how 

 alone that resolution might be realized, viz., by the accumulation of 



