888 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



the fanner an opportunity to change his employment that is lacking 

 in the West. Today the Western farmer, like the Eastern, begins 

 to see he is underpaid for his work, and more than that, he sees that 

 with the present price of Western farm lands, the interest on his 

 investment is glaringly inadequate. For after all, in buying a farm, 

 you only buy a job, and if you can get a job without buying it and 

 put your money in a bank, how much better you are off. Realization 

 of this fact is a great though not recognized factor in the depression 

 of Eastern farm values. Realization of this fact will send down the 

 high prices of Western lands before those lands have been depleted. 

 The farmer sells his labor in the form of cabbages, potatoes, eggs, 

 wheat. He makes a small per cent on the cost of his farm, machinery, 

 and work animals. Very likely, he barely keeps even on the last two 

 items and has them merely that he may sell his labor. In Wisconsin 

 a farmer makes his wages and 3 per cent on his investment a low 

 rate for that section. If you are a Wisconsin farmer possessed of an 

 average-sized Wisconsin farm, two hundred acres worth the average 

 Wisconsin price of one hundred dollars an acre, would it not profit 

 you to sell the farm, invest your money at 4 per cent anyway, and 

 probably 5, and sell your labor in some occupation in a town ? Or 

 why should a man in Massachusetts with $5,000 spend it in buying a 

 job by buying a farm, when he could buy a house in town for $2,500, 

 put $2,500 in the savings bank and sell his labor for money to a mill 

 owner instead of to a storekeeper for barter ? 



The census for 1900 gives the national average of the wages of 

 white farm laborers working a ten-hour day without board, as eighty- 

 seven cents. This was all the farm employee could earn, all the farm 

 employer could afford to pay. Any sort of discussion of the remunera- 

 tiveness of farming in the last decade is almost needless in view of 

 these figures. Montana paid the highest wages, $1.72, the Caro- 

 linas the lowest, fifty-three cents. Wages hi the South were low, but 

 Michigan paid only ninety-eight cents, Wisconsin ninety-nine, Indiana 

 eighty-one, Illinois ninety-one. To be sure, the farmer gets his living 

 off his place, but the farm laborer working at an average of eighty- 

 seven cents has nothing included with that. Perhaps you will ask 

 about the stories of farm profits to be read in agricultural magazines 

 and about the constant statement of farmers' prosperity in the editorial 

 columns of a myriad daily papers. The stories of personal experience 

 in the agricultural press are psychologically much the same as patent 

 medicine testimonials. The poor fellows like to see themselves in 



