200 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



farming of this sort means robbing the future for an illicit present 

 gain. 



We have been used to tenancy so long, under a land system which 

 particularly favours it, that opinion is not likely readily to surrender 

 one of its favourite tenets. If people considering the question 

 would, however, only look around them, they would perceive in 

 what a quite peculiar position we stand, with practically only Italy, 

 in its acknowledged backwardness and comparative poverty, and 

 some of the Eastern countries, likewise owing to backwardness, to 

 keep us company. In America tenancy is taboo, although, to the 

 regret of statesmen and economists, it has lately been spreading. 

 But that is one of the newly-formed powerful farmers' party's chief 

 grievances, and in its demands formally put forward in its recent 

 proclamations, upon both candidates for the Presidency and candi- 

 dates for seats in Congress, it names among its principal points 

 the substantial reduction of tenancy. France is practically all 

 freehold, more particularly in its small holdings. Tenants are to 

 be found on the large estates in Normandy, the Nivernais and 

 similar regions. Germany is practically all freehold farming ; so 

 is Austria ; so is Switzerland ; so are the Scandinavian kingdoms, 

 and in the main the Low Countries. 



" Tenancy has ever," so remarks Mr. Henry C. Taylor, the active 

 chief of the office of Farm Management in the United States 

 Department of Agriculture, late Professor of Economics at the 

 Madison University, in his recent work " Agricultural Economics," 

 "been looked upon as a stepping stone, a temporary means of 

 acquiring the use of land, not as a permanent condition for any 

 individual." 'It is a matter of common observation," so says 

 Mr. Taylor, "that in the northern States young men start in as 

 labourers, become tenant farmers and join the ranks of landowning 

 farmers." And he adds, to account for the rather observable increase 

 in the number of tenant farmers in the period between 1880 and 1900, 

 that in that period " the movement from the wage-earners to the 

 tenant farmers was abnormally rapid " — which, from our present 

 point of view, is a healthy sign. 



In Italy, Roumania, and so on, it is backwardness, coupled with 

 the same capitalism that we see arrayed against us in our country, 

 that keeps tenancy in vogue. And people are rebelling against it, 

 as will still be shown. It is that capitalism which, reigning in 

 Italy, even in ancient time, made Rome perish, as the younger 

 Pliny has placed on record. "Sweating" the tenant as well as 

 the labourer it was which produced that very interesting, but 



