HUMAN EFFORT AS A FACTOR IN PRODUCTION 223 



cases on record where the issue was settled by a strike of the women 

 or the children. The sweet and simple joys of the country sour into 

 mere loneliness and an unimagined barrenness of days and nights 

 particularly nights. Many are the converts of the early exhortation 

 who have already completed that enlightening but impoverishing 

 round trip from the shop or office to the farm and back again. 



But not even all those who persist in their intention of becoming 

 farmers, and who actually remain in the business, constitute" a real 

 addition to our farm population. Though a thousand city men 

 become farmers, there is no gain to the country nor loss to the city if 

 they merely replace a thousand farmers who sell or rent their farms 

 and move to town rilling the jobs abandoned by the rural emigrants 

 and living in the houses they vacated. Some expansion into new 

 regions has been going on, of course, as growth of transportation or 

 development of irrigation systems, drainage projects, and dry-farming 

 methods have made other areas productive. Sometimes a larger farm 

 has been broken up into smaller tracts, so that two or several men 

 farm where one man farmed before. Absolute growth in both area 

 and numbers has gone steadily on, but it is in the figures showing 

 relative growth that the really significant facts are revealed. The 

 Thirteenth Census shows an increase of farm land of not quite 5 per 

 cent, and improved land in farms of less than 15^ per cent, while 

 population increased 21 per cent. Cities grew three times as fast as 

 rural districts. The percentage of our population to be found outside 

 incorporated places of twenty-five hundred people or more, fell from 

 58.4 per cent in 1900 to 53.7 per cent in 1910. 



B. Some Special Classes of Labor 



63. IMMIGRATION AS A SOURCE OF FARM LABORERS 1 

 BY JOHN LEE COULTER 



Agriculture has so long been looked upon as the dumping-ground 

 of all surplus labor in case of city industries, of all poverty-stricken 

 persons in case of famines, and all revolutionary individuals in case 

 of disruption of European countries, that it is hard to realize that we 

 have reached the state where farming in practically all of its branches 

 requires a very high order of intelligence and the capacity to grasp 

 and use a great variety of scientific facts. We may, therefore, say 



1 Adapted from The Annals, XXXIII (March, 1909), 373-79. See also 

 selection 262 for a discussion of attempts to distribute immigrants. 



