believe that when we arrive at the necessity for importing food that the cost of living will not further increase while to meet the competition of cheap labor abroad there must be a decrease in manufacturing cost-wages, in other words? Not any. It is up to us to rid our agricultural system of the tenant farming evil, the tenant farmer if we can, and along with him the shiftless, ignorant farm owner. It has been ascertained by exhaustive inquiry that more than four of every ten farms in the United States are occupied by tenant farmers. As a rule tenant farms are smaller than farms tilled by the owner, but it probably is safe to say that one-third the cultivated area is occupied by tenants. The greater part of this tenant cultivated area is east of the Mississippi River, but the corn belt of the Middle West is feeling him as a growing affliction and he is beginning to obtain a foothold in the wheat country. Oklahoma, the Ozark regions of Missouri and Arkansas, Northern and Western Texas and the more western states are a little too new for him yet, but ultimately he will invade them. West of the Mississippi he is most numerous in Iowa, where he numbers about forty per cent. of the farmers and in Missouri where he numbers thirty per cent. In Illinois he numbers forty-one per cent. In Kansas and Nebraska the tenants make up from ten to forty-six per cent. of the farmers, a general average of thirty-six per cent. in the former state and in both the percentage is growing. In the more eastern states the percentage jumps from thirty per cent. in Missouri and forty-one per cent. in Illinois, to fifty and, in some sections as high as seventyfive per cent. in Indiana, Ohio, and the states south of the Ohio River. In a recent bulletin of the Department of Agriculture it was stated that the list of tenants in one county in Ohio who were moving in the spring from one farm to another filled newspaper page in small type. The paper said it was the custom in that county for renters to remain only one year on a farm. Just recently a daily paper, recording the fact that nearly every voter in Adams County, Ohio, had been disfranchised for selling votes in elections said: * * * "It is a county of tenant farmers * a county of rutty, unkempt roads, ramshackle farm buildings and corrupt people." In the Eastern and New England states the tenant population drops as low as ten per cent. in some sections, where the tenant has long since skimmed the cream of the soil and moved to greener fields, leaving behind him a worn-out, cropweary earth which must lie fallow for many years until Nature's laboratory restores again some measure of its fertility. Between 1880 and 1890 the improved farm area of the New England state decreased 38.1 per cent. As he has done in New England, the tenant farmer is doing in Ohio, in Michigan, in Indiana and in Illinois, so will he do in Minne sota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. He farms for today, tomorrow is the landlord's risk. It is, as in law, caveat emptor,-let the owner look out for himself. That's what the tenant farmer is doing. Every spring the devastating army of tenants prepares to descend upon new fields. The great moving day in the country is March 1, the day on which the tenant farmer invades the farm he is to ravish for the season. Nine times out of ten he finds the land just as it was when the previous tenant harvested his tenant evil. One is the purchase by city NOTHING MUCH TO LOOK AT THE KIND OF TENANT HOME THEY crops the ground unbroken, not an ounce of fertilizer applied, the dwelling and outhouses in need of repairs, the fences falling to pieces. In a word the whole plant is run down. Sometimes the tenant pays a cash rent, so much per acre. If he works on shares he pays from one-third to one-half the crop, according to what goes with the land. Either system is an evil and between the two there doesn't appear to be much choice. Some owners prefer the cash rent system as the surest in the long run. Other landowners prefer the crop-sharing plan as bringing the largest returns. Either way the landlord usually gets a better return on his investment than the tenant gets for his labor and investment. At least ninety per cent of the tenant leases are for a year, and from that very fact the tenant system has grown to be the evil it is. The tenant has no assurance that he will be permitted to occupy the place the next year and, naturally, he has no interest in the farm other than to get all he can out of it. Why should he spend any time maintaining the fertility of the soil or making repairs for the benefit of the landlord and the next tenant? He does just as his predecessor did. He gets all he can while the getting is good. Three causes contribute largely to the he fancies that the value will go on increasing with the years so he doesn't worry if the old place runs down a little and his share of the crops is not as large as it might be. A large number of the farms in the Middle West that are passing into the hands of tenants have been stock farms or dairy farms or both-farms where practically all of the crops were fed at home and in due course returned to the soil in the form of manure. The tenant farmer is not going to raise stock. First of all he has not the capital and secondly he isn't temperamentally equipped for the work-in other words he is too shiftless. The third reason is that, properly to raise stock he must be assured of a longer lease than one year. Therefore he produces only the crops easiest of cultivation and surest of ready sale-which always happen to be the crops that take most fertility from the soil. He tries no experiments. He adds nothing to the sum of agricultural knowledge except the lesson to beware of him. He burns his straw and his soil-renewing manure rots against the side of his barn. fruit trees and the hedge go untrimmed, the weeds run riot and the farm implements rust in the spot where the last job was finished. He is too busy skinning the soil to repair the house, the barn The or the fences. His live stock is nondescript stuff out of which he gets the maximum of work at the minimum of cost. He has no community interests. He is here today and there tomorrow. He has nothing in common with his neighbors. Home is where he hangs his hat. The farm is both a factory and a home and it has a value peculiar to each. When, as the temporary abiding place of the tenant farmer it ceases to be a home it has lost part of its value and it lowers the value of its particular neighborhood at the same time. Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana lands, far richer than lands in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri or Iowa, sell for $25 an acre. From 58 to 62 per cent. of the farmers in these states are tenants, a large proportion negroes. Farmed by white owners these lands would be worth $100 to $200 an acre. That is the value of community interest. Conditions in the South, are, of course, extreme, but look about you in the northern states and you will find that land in the districts largely farmed by tenants is disproportionately lower in the value than in districts where the owners till their land. The lesser value is not wholly traceable to the difference in the usage of the soil. Part of it is due to the lack of community spirit, the smaller part, of course. The larger percentage of difference in value is due to the fact that the tenant is robbing the soil that he works while the owning farmer is continually doctoring his land to keep it at the highest stage of fertility. Now the question is: What's to be done about it? The prices of all farm products are going up, exports are falling off and home consumption is approaching perilously close to our production. It is a situation that will give economists plenty to think about in the next few years. One-third of our agricultural area is being cropped into barrenness by tenants. "In most parts of the country," a Department of Agriculture report says, "the land has been farmed so long without attention to fertility that it will no longer produce crops by the slipshod methods formerly in vogue." But the tenant alone is not to blame. He shares the responsibility with two other classes-the landlord and the shift less land-owning farmer. The same department bulletin says: "Many experienced farmers today are not making a good living for the simple reason that they do not possess the knowledge of the principles involved in their business, and unfortunately only too often the farmer is not aware of his lack of knowledge." It is doubtful whether tenant farming can be done away with entirely. Practically all of the arable government land is taken up and the tendency now is toward the enlargement of individual holdings rather than toward the division of holdings into smaller bodies, which would be far the most desirable condition from an economic standpoint. Land values continually are rising so that the tenant's chances for becoming a landowner are growing more remote. Take Illinois and Missouri as typical states. The last census gives the average value of farm land in 1910 in Illinois as $94.90 an acre against $46.17 in 1900; in Missouri as $49.56 an acre in 1910 as against $24.82 in 1900, an increase in each state of more than 100 per cent. The average farm area in Illinois is 129 acres against 124 acres in 1900, and in Missouri it is 125 acres against 119 in 1900. It is an unwritten law in most farming communities in the Middle West that when a farmer desires to sell out he must first offer to his neighbors, the result being to keep out strangers, and enlarge the average farm area, as well as to cut down the rural population. An exhaustive investigation showed that this "unwritten law" was largely responsible for Missouri's loss in population outside of its large cities. as Getting down to the solving of the tenant problem, the ideal solution of course, would be to turn the tenant into an owner. Possession stimulates pride. Make the tenant an owner and, where he is not entirely shiftless he begins to take pride in his ownership and starts off on the road to regeneration. No man with a modicum of sense is going to rob himself if he knows it, or rob the land that he owns. But the chances for the tenant becoming a landlord are growing more remote. Next to ownership, undoubtedly the best solution of the tenant problem would be the indeterminate lease system, assuring the tenant possession so long as his behavior and usage of the land warrants it. The tenant, under such conditions, has an interest in keeping up the fertility of the soil-in fact, that should be one of the conditions of his lease-and he willingly will learn how he may do better than he has done. But the real foundation of any remedy for the tenant problem, says President Waters, is education. Governor Eber- · hardt of Minnesota, who also has been studying the question, says the same thing. "In Minnesota," Governor Eberhardt said, "many farmers have been mining the soil instead of tilling it. The presence or the prospect of the abandoned farm is a subject of interest in almost every state. We must get the soil back to where it was, for it should yield from fifty to 100 per cent. more than it does. We must educate the farmers and we must begin at the beginning-the children. In Minnesota we are doing this by building up consolidated schools where the vocational and industrial training so freely offered in the cities is brought within the reach of the farm child. We teach in the consolidated schools practical agriculture, manual training and home. economics, and we bring to them the elders of the community for their cooperative meetings, lectures on agricultural topics and social purposes. Ultimately we shall accomplish much in stopping the reckless waste of our fertility and in increasing our production." "Educate both the tenant and the landlord," President Waters says. "The landlord is, unconsciously, the tenant's accomplice. We must educate him to the evils of the short lease system and we must educate him to give closer attention both to his tenant and to his land. So long as the system of short leases prevails and the tenant is allowed to skin the land the faults of tenant farming will not decrease. "Next we must take the tenant by the neck, if necessary, and force into him a little knowledge of real farming. First we must assure him long tenancy, conditioned, of course, upon good behavior. We must teach him soil conservation to maintain the productivity of his land, we must teach him seed selection to increase his yield, we must teach him diversified farming to lessen the chance of loss, we must teach him the value of good roads and we must pump into him a sense of pride in appearance and achievement and top it off by inculcating a little public spirit. The first thing we know we will have a land owner who will always be referred to as 'So and So, a prosperous farmer of the High Creek neighborhood.'" Europe has tackled the tenant farmer problem with success. Denmark not many years ago was tenant ridden to such an extent that the government finally was compelled to act. Agricultural schools were established, public funds were used to expropriate lands "WE MUST EDUCATE THE FARMER AND WE MUST BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING-THE CHILDREN." and sell them to the tenants on easy terms. Sixty-five per cent. of the population lived on farms and a large majority of them were tenants. Now only one farm in ten is rented and every acre of land under cultivation produces an annual surplus of products worth $9. There are twenty-nine agricultural colleges and 6,000 students. Ireland is undergoing Ireland is undergoing the same transformation through the expropriation of large estate and the sale of the land to the tenants on easy terms. Great Britain and Germany, France and other countries are struggling with the problem. "Denmark," President Waters said, "is becoming the most prosperous country in Europe, and that is due to the work of its agricultural colleges. The value of the work our own agricultural colleges are doing is incalculable, but we do not yet cover the field. Our seed and soil trains, our dairy trains, our 'pork chop specials,' our farmers' institutes and our extension lectures are bringing fine results but they do not go deep enough. They do not reach the men we most desire to reach-the tenant farmer and the shiftless farmer. The tenant farmer feels himself more or less of an outlander in the community or he is prejudiced against new fangled notions, as are a large proportion of the "shiftless" farmers. We must get into his home, we must educate his wife and children. He must be taught his part of the work, the wife hers. We must teach her domestic economy, sewing, cooking, hygiene and the proper rearing of the children. The children are the hope of the farm and the farmer is the foundation of all our prosperity. "It must be remembered that the majority of farm children never get as far as the college, many never pass the high school and some never reach beyond the rudiments of education. Especially is this true of the tenant farmer's children, many of whom, under the conditions as they now exist, will become tenant farmers in their turn. We must begin with these children in the primary grades to teach them that there is something more to agriculture than scratching of |