DANGERS OF THE TENANT SYSTEM 69 



42. Tenants. In the United States 37 farmers out of 

 every hundred are tenants, or renters, of the farms they 

 work. This is an increase of thirteen tenants per hundred 

 farmers since 1810. In some sections of the South the 

 proportion of tenant farmers exceeds ninety per cent, the 

 large majority being negroes. 



The main causes of the tenant class are : 



(1) Increase in the price of land ; 



(2) The lure to the centers of population ; 



(3) The desire to make safe investments by men of 

 means. 



So long as free land could be secured from the govern- 

 ment by any one who took the trouble to go west and to 

 establish a claim, the price of land was low and labor was 

 high. When the supply of free land became practically 

 exhausted, ten or twenty years ago, land values began to 

 rise, and it became increasingly difficult for men of meager 

 means to buy farms. 



43. Dangers of the Tenant System. John Stuart Mill, a 

 famous English writer of the last century, held that small 

 farms, owned by those who work them, are necessary for 

 individual and national well-being. Farm tenancy in 

 America is not necessarily a bad thing. Most tenants are 

 young farmers for whom tenancy is a stepping stone to 

 ownership. There are nevertheless some undesirable 

 features associated with it. Tenants are apt to take little 

 interest in community affairs. As a rule they keep less 



There are more than ten times as many people to the square mile in Germany, 

 for instance, as in the United States, or, to be exact, 320 to 31. Intensive 

 cultivation is generally a necessity abroad; but, as yet, in many localities 

 here, it is not yet advisable. Just as there is a point beyond which it is not 

 profitable to add an additional pound of weight to growing steers, just so there 

 is a limit to higher and higher yields of crops. A man may raise forty bushels 

 of wheat to the acre and go in debt ; another may raise twenty bushels to the 

 acre and have a generous income. The cost of production, not the yield per 

 acre, is the important thing. 



