SHARE CROPPERS, SHARE AND CASH RENTERS 65 



$398; and for cash renters $478. The average rate of interest 

 received by the landlord from share croppers was 13.6 per cent; 

 from share renters 11.8 per cent ; and from cash renters 6.6 

 per cent. 



A survey in Johnson County, Missouri, speaks of farm tenancy 

 there in these terms: 



"A rural community where 80 per cent of the population is changing every 

 five years cannot have desirable social conditions." 



"A study of the foregoing results (advantages and disadvantages of 

 tenancy) leads to the conclusion that the present system of land tenure is 

 undesirable, first because it encourages tenants to become shiftless, second, 

 because it depletes the soil, third, because it is very detrimental to the improv- 

 ing of rural social conditions." 



The Wisconsin State Board of Public Affairs, in 1912, sought 

 a remedy for increasing tenancy. They first canvassed the actual 

 situation in Wisconsin, and found that in the new lands of the 

 north there is little tenancy, but in the older higher priced lands, 

 tenancy is large and growing larger. To quote, and condense 

 freely, from the Board's report: 



"This suggests that in Wisconsin as in other parts of the Middle West 

 the proportion of farm tenancy increases as the cost of a farm becomes 

 greater . . . There is no convincing evidence of an increase in farm owner- 

 ship. On the contrary, the evidence seems to indicate that there will be a 

 continuous increase in tenancy generally throughout Wisconsin, unless steps 

 are taken to prevent it. It is the duty of the state to encourage the proper 

 settlement of its undeveloped farm lands. It is just as much the duty of the 

 state and this is a duty of self-protection to encourage farm ownership by 

 taking measures to check the growth of farm tenancy. These measures should 

 be taken in time while the proportion of tenant farmers in the state is still 

 relatively low and the problem of dealing with them, therefore, more simple 

 than it will be if left unattacked until a solution is absolutely forced on the 

 people of the state. 



"Wisconsin should be taking warning from the experience of other states 

 in the Middle West. The 1910 census shows that already in Illinois more 

 than 41 in every 100 farms are operated by tenant farmers and that in some 

 counties in that state more than 60 in every 100 farms are so operated . . . 



"The best that can be said for any system of farm tenancy involving any 

 large proportion of the agricultural population, is that it is better than some- 

 thing worse. It may be argued, for example, that it is better for the negro 

 in the southern states to be a tenant farmer than to be a slave or a casual 

 laborer. In comparison with farm ownership, there can be no argument for 

 farm tenancy as a system of land tenure. Statesmen and political thinkers 

 the world over have for centuries recognized the truth in this statement and 

 have urged and enacted into law plans for governmental activity to check 

 landlordism and promote farm ownership by the actual fanners. To-day 

 some of the most important questions engaging the attention of the parlia- 

 ments of Europe, Australia and New Zealand are questions of land policy. 

 The people of Great Britain are at the present time engaged in a tremendous 

 struggle to free the land in England from the grasp of the landlord so that the 

 man who will farm it can have it to farm advantageously. In Ireland the 

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