l AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



cheaper lands. The number of Americans, mostly farmers, who left the 

 United States for Canada exceeded 100,000 annually by 1911, while other 

 thousands moved to the Mountain States, to the Pacific Coast, to the 

 South, and even to Mexico. 23 These migrations were attended by far 

 greater risks than most of the migrating farmers fully understood. Farm- 

 ing by irrigation or farming in an area of reduced rainfall involved new 

 techniques, and while the land was cheaper, the man who purchased it 

 was often poorer before he mastered them. Corn belt farmers who went 

 west found out, usually only by experience, that beyond the ninety-ninth 

 meridian conditions of corn growing were far less satisfactory than in the 

 regions from which they had come. But they left in numbers just the 

 same, and upon the land they vacated there often came tenants who were 

 far less able to do the work than the men who had sold out. The time 

 had come, said one editorialist, when Americans should settle down. 

 "The farmers of the United States have been playing leapfrog over each 

 other for over a hundred years, in fact, ever since the Revolution. ... It is 

 time for us to realize that the value of land depends more than anything 

 else on the men who farm it." 24 But, at least as far as Iowa was concerned, 

 all such pleas were in vain. That state lost steadily in farm population, and 

 the census of 1910 even showed a decline in the total number of in- 

 habitants. 25 



Rents paid by tenants varied. The prevailing rent in Illinois, according 

 to one landlord, was half the corn, two-fifths the oats, and $5 an acre for 

 meadow and pasture. In the corn belt states generally it was customary 

 for the tenant to pay from one-third to one-half the grain he raised as 

 rent. He was required, as a rule, to furnish all the necessary teams, imple- 

 ments, and seed, and in addition whatever labor was necessary to cultivate 

 the land and keep it in good shape. He might also be expected to pay the 



23. Senate Document 705, 60 Congress, 2 session, p. 49. 



24. Wallaces' Farmer, XXXVIII (October 31, 1913), p. 1475. See also ibid., 

 XXXIX (luly 24, 1914), p. 1044: 



"I never saw an oft removed tree, 

 Nor yet an oft removed familee, 

 That throve so well 

 As one that settled be." 



25. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, Abstract, p. 24. 



