12 THE FARMER AND THE NEW DAY 



unquestionably rural public opinion is narrow with re- 

 spect to the real values created by middlemen; and 

 probably distribution has been charged with failures 

 that as a matter of fact are due to poor business man- 

 agement on the part of farmers, or to competition be- 

 tween rival areas of production, or merely to the influ- 

 ence of the season's weather. Nevertheless there is 

 ample ground for the assertion that the farmers are 

 quite right in the main contention. Our system of dis- 

 tributing food products works in general against the 

 farmers' interests. Wonderfully complete and ef- 

 fective in many ways as a system of carrying food from 

 and into all corners of an immense country and into 

 foreign lands, it is a system costly to run and built up 

 with scant regard to the farmer's share. 



3. The growth in tenant farming has become notable, 

 especially in quite recent years. To a degree this was 

 inevitable. A vast number of American farmers came 

 into possession of their farms either by direct gift of 

 the nation or at prices that were merely nominal. 

 Ownership was made easy. There was small excuse 

 for tenant farming. As soon, however, as the demand 

 for land outran the supply of virgin soil, the landless 

 farmers were compelled to rent in order to " get a 

 start." No doubt a fair proportion of present day 

 tenant farming is due simply to the fact that the farmer 

 has to use this method of arriving at ownership he 

 is on the way to possession. But there are features of 

 this movement toward tenantry that are very disturb- 

 ing. It is in the main a transient form of tenant farm- 

 ing. Figures gathered by the Census Bureau in 1910 

 showed that out of six and one-third million farmers, 

 1,787,473 tenant farmers had been on the land they 

 were tilling four years or less, and 1,123,722 but one 



