AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



seded by some form of contract leasehold, by 

 which the former slaves or wage laborers were 

 given charge of .... small tracts of land, upon 

 which they were to raise crops." 



Thus we find that while more than a third of 

 the farmers of the United States hire the land 

 which they cultivate, these hired farms are so gen- 

 erally held by men who live near by, that the rela- 

 tion of landlord and tenant is generally a personal 

 one, and the problems of absenteeism and of con- 

 centration of ownership which have been so per- 

 plexing in certain other countries have as yet been 

 of little significance in the United States. Never- 

 theless the statistics for the last twenty years show 

 a significant increase in tenancy, and it is to be 

 expected that the men who have made fortunes in 

 the great industries of the cities will eventually 

 invest some of their savings in landed estates, and 

 in this way bring forward problems from which 

 we have hitherto been comparatively free. 



Section V . The relations between landlords 

 and tenants in the United States. Thirty-five and 

 three-tenths per cent, of all the farms in the 

 United States, exclusive of Alaska and the insular 

 possessions, were occupied by tenant farmers in 

 1900. In all 2,024,964 farms were operated by 

 this class of farmers. Of these, 1,273,299 or 62.8 

 per cent, were operated by share tenants and 751,- 

 665 or 37.2 per cent, by cash tenants. A farm 

 was said to be operated by a cash tenant if culti- 

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