210 THE THIRD POWER 



comes more and more complicated and demands a high intel- 

 ligence for its operation, the qualifications of agricultural 

 wage-earners in the United States are becoming lower and 

 lower. So it becomes self-evident that the share of land in 

 agricultural production of the country is extremely insig- 

 nificant and the item representing the ownership of the land 

 (interest on the capital invested in the total value of the re- 

 turns of agricultural industry of the United States) is infi- 

 nitely small. Thus the total value of agricultural production 

 of the country, which in 1899 amounted to $4,739,118,752, or 

 $826 per farm, represents almost exclusively the labor of the 

 American farmers (owners, half owners, share tenants and 

 cash tenants) performed by the farmer, his wife and his 

 babes, with entirely insignificant help of hired men (just 0.77 

 per farm in 1900), only "bonanza farms" excepted. This is 

 the very reason why the small farmer of this free country 

 competes out of existence the great "bonanza farms," which 

 are at present breaking up and gradually disappearing. By 

 virtue of eternal and incredible toil of himself and his family 

 in the fields, from sunrise to sunset of a long summer day, the 

 small American farmer performed the impossible economic 

 feat of eating up the big fish of American agriculture. This 

 feat puzzled all writers of his country on economics, and some 

 of them have even been driven to nervous prostration or to 

 convulsions. 



According to the latest and most realiable official wage sta- 

 tistics, farm laborers of this country during the last decade of 

 the last century have never been working less than ten hours 

 a day (sixty hours per week), quite often twelve hours a day 

 (seventy-two hours per week), and in some instances fifteen 

 hours a day (ninety hours per week) (Fifteenth Annual Re- 

 port of the Commissioner of Labor, 1900, pp. 532-534). Now, 

 any one who knows anything about the American agriculture, 

 knows very well that farmers themselves and members of their 

 families, as a rule, work much longer hours than their "hired 

 men," hastily picked up from anywhere. Thus it appears that 

 cold and impartial eloquence of figures confirms our conclu- 

 sion, that the American farmer, his wife and his babes work 

 longer hours than any other working being in the land and 



