222 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



a farm. In Germany, where peasant proprietorship is the 

 rule, the farms are handed down from father to son by in- 

 heritance, and thus the property is kept in the hands of the 

 tillers of the soil. The conditions with respect to inherited 

 wealth are, therefore, of great importance in determining the 

 status of farmers with respect to landownership. 



In the United States it is a matter of common observation 

 that farmers who are able to do so, assist their sons in 

 buying farms. This assistance may be relatively very great 

 in the case of a wealthy farmer who has a small family; and 

 again it may be very small in the case of a farmer in moderate 

 circumstances, who has a large number of children among whom 

 he wishes to distribute his assistance. Often the home farm is 

 greatly enlarged by purchasing a " forty " here and an " eighty " 

 there while the boys are growing to manhood, and then parceled 

 out as the young men wish to establish homes for themselves. 

 Again, when the parents are gone, the remainder of their ac- 

 cumulated wealth passes by inheritance to their sons and 

 daughters and helps very greatly in the enlargement of 

 their farms as their growing families make larger farms de- 

 sirable. 



The movement of population from country to city, which 

 has been so great in recent years in this country, results in the 

 transfer of a vast amount of wealth from the agricultural in- 

 dustry, which must be replaced from some source if the wealth 

 of farmers is not to decline. The general principle may be 

 thus stated : The greater the amount of land and other forms of 

 wealth acquired by one generation and transmitted to the farmers 

 of the next, and the more evenly this wealth is distributed, the 

 greater the ease with which the ownership of land may be acquired 

 by the succeeding generations of farmers; but the larger the farm 

 families of a given community, and the larger the percentage of 

 each succeeding generation who seek a livelihood in other indus- 

 tries, the greater the amount of wealth which will be drawn from 

 agriculture into other industries by gift and inheritance, and the 

 smaller the part which inherited wealth will play in the acquistion 

 of landownership. 



