202 THE THIRD POWER 



come of 22.7 cents per day, it becomes apparent in this partic- 

 ular case the workman receives more than his employer and 

 that the latter is simply his fellow co-worker, just with smaller 

 pay. 



The most striking illustration of this social phenomenon 

 of free country we find in the most interesting and instructive 

 article by Charles B. Spahr, published about three years ago. 

 "When I asked this farmer," says Mr. Spahr, "why the large 

 farms were breaking up into small ones," he put the whole 

 case in a single picturesque phrase. 'There are,' he said, 'only 

 two sure crops in the country — ice and children, and the small 

 farmer has the children.' ' (The Outlook, November 4, 1899, 

 p. 566.) This means that the small farmer can successfully 

 compete with the large farms and even compete them out of 

 existence, simply because he employs the cheapest labor in the 

 land, resorts to incredible and unbearable toil of his wife and 

 babes, to which no hired man will ever submit. Yet, while 

 the conscience of the nation has been recently aroused against 

 female and child labor in workshops and factories, no one 

 ever mentions about the terrible lot of farmers' children and 

 his wife, who, according to the most reliable statistics, fur- 

 nishes the largest percentage to the American insane asylums. 



How, then, it came to this that the American farmers, who 

 created the country and her institutions, once independent and 

 contented producers, became reduced to the state of real pro- 

 letarians of the land? 



This is a long story and we will try to make it as short as 

 possible. 



This is a well-known fact that agriculture of to-day greatly 

 differs from agriculture of several generations ago. While 

 it still embraces several, more or less different industries, 

 such as wheat raising, market gardening, poultry farming, bee 

 farming, stock raising, etc., these are just a comparatively 

 small part of all the industries, which constituted the agri- 

 culture of olden times. As soon as any branch of old, origi- 

 nal agriculture becomes subject to great mechanical improve- 

 ments, as soon as it has been touched by great industrial ad- 

 vance of our times, it is invariably taken from the farm and 

 transferred to the factory. Whenever any process in agri- 



