AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



others who believed that the movement was rather 

 from free ownership of farms to encumbered 

 ownership, and finally to the ranks of the tenant 

 class. In a later number of the same magazine 

 Henry George responded to the articles by Messrs. 

 King and Strong as follows: "Tenancy is not 

 the normal state of man, and is so far from being 

 the primary condition of American agriculture 

 that we have been accustomed to look on the 

 American farmer as necessarily the owner of the 

 acres he tilled. Mr. Strong would have us think, 

 and Professor King really seems to think, that 

 tenant farming is, in the natural order of things, 

 the intermediary stage through which 'Agricul- 

 tural laborers' are enabled to pass into a condition 

 of landowners, just as, in the older handicrafts the 

 condition of journeyman was the intermediary 

 condition between that of apprentice, with which 

 all craftsmen must begin, and that of master 

 workman, to which all could aspire. The truth is 

 just the reverse of this. Tenant farming is the 

 intermediary stage through which independent 

 tillers of the soil have in other countries passed, 

 and in this country are now beginning to pass, to 

 the condition of agricultural laborers and chronic 

 paupers. 



"But sufficiently startling as is the fact that in 



1880, more than one- fourth of American farms 



were cultivated by tenants, this of itself does not 



fully indicate how largely our agricultural popu- 



240 



