250 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



dependence to thousands of white men whose lives had been one of 

 woeful sacrifice to the slave-worked plantation economy, the tragedy of 

 whose wretched existence has never yet been written, but it was cal- 

 culated vastly to increase the wealth of the country; for, to a point 

 not yet reached in the United States, the productiveness of farms rises 

 exactly as their acreage decreases. 



But no sooner had the more enterprising of the southern population 

 begun to succeed than the tendency to a wider distribution of land 

 met a counter tendency towards the increase in the size of estates, 

 doubly augmented by the prosperity of some and the misfortunes of 

 others. It may be safely asserted that to-day the best type of southern 

 farmer either owns a large estate, or is paying for tracts recently 

 added to his plantation, or is expecting to make such additions. He 

 has set a thousand acres as the goal of his ambition. In many localities 

 this feeling has grown into such an insatiable land hunger on the part 

 of wealthy planters as seriously to handicap young farmers who have 

 not inherited property. 



One bulwark protects, but not completely, the country from serious 

 injury from this tendency: there are so many men with this same 

 ambition and with the same chances for gratifying it. 



The vast majority of southern farmers, 93i^ per cent., are in- 

 cluded in the three classes of owners, cash tenants and share tenants. 

 Owners operate 47 per cent, of the whole number of farms; cash 

 tenants I7I/2 per cent., and share tenants 29% per cent. The desira- 

 bility of these three classes is in the order of their enumeration, as is 

 also their wealth-producing capacity, even to a degree beyond what 

 appears from glancing at the figures. It is the universal rule that 

 small farms of any given tenure are more productive than large farms ; 

 so that when we consider that notwithstanding the fact that cash ten- 

 ant farms are one third larger than share farms and owner-operated 

 farms are two and one third times larger than share farms, yet the 

 productivity of owners and of cash tenants exceeds that of share ten- 

 ants, while that of owners almost equals that of the much smaller 

 cash-tenanted farms, the relative superiority of the different forms of 

 tenure is more thoroughly revealed. 



Table I. 

 Tenure, Area and Productivity of Southern Farms. 



Average size of farms operated by white farmers of all tenures, 173 A. 

 " " " " " colored " " " " 53 A. 



