144 FARMERS' UNION AND FEDERATION 



and professional services to the farmers advanced sharply, 

 for why shouldn't people with such glowing prospects for 

 wealth pay more? Every rain or snow from the time farm- 

 ers begin to plow for next year's wheat crop until it is ready 

 to harvest from August to June is heralded as a million- 

 dollar donation to the farmers, and everybody living off the 

 farmers' patronage want their share of it immediately. When 

 the crop finally fizzles out from too much hot air, everyone 

 looks blue but says nothing, and the outside world is left in 

 the dark as to what became of the farmers' immense wealth 

 they had heard of. 



Should the crop, from some occasional freak of nature, 

 really turn out to be a mortgage-lifter, as they are erroneously 

 called from their great size, it is found that their excess has 

 been more than discounted in price by the grain gamblers, 

 and less money is realized on them than on poor crops. Yet 

 the fiction is still kept alive that they are mortgage-lifters, 

 when in reality they are the reverse. But one never sees 

 these mortgage statistics in the papers because they tell 

 things the population boosters do not want made public. 

 So I shall just drag them out from their hiding place and 

 show them up. 



Of the 118,031 owned farm homes in Kansas in 1890, 

 65,483, or 55.5 per cent of them, were mortgaged to an av- 

 erage of $1,126 to the farm, a total of $73,749,283. Of the 

 111,108 owned farms in 1910, 49,249, or 44.8 per cent, were 

 mortgaged on an average of $2,326, a total of $70,819,736. 

 The number of these farms decreased in the twenty years 

 6,923, while the mortgaged debt per farm increased $1,200- 

 That does not speak well for the great mortgage-lifting crops 

 doing their expected duty. 



In 1880, 22,651, or 16.3 per cent, of Kansas farms were 

 operated by tenants, which in 1910 had risen to 65,398, or 

 36.8 per cent of the farms thus operated. These rented 

 farms represent largely those on which mortgages were fore- 



