The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, November 25, 1918, Page 9

ti . pensation on the exgiration of the lease. R Our Barbarous Farm Tenancy System e e A O - Old World Land Laws, Now Abolished in Many European Countries, in Fuli | Operation Here—Impoverish the Soil as Well as Man ‘ »]O ALL who are interested in the welfare of the man who toils on the farm, our farm tenancy is an evil with no redeeming fea- tures. And as is so often the case an injury to one is an in- jury to all. The landlord finds his farm running down under the tenancy system, and he is saved only by the increment to land value which comes from our rapid increase in population. The land- ov{ning farmer finds the tenant an unsatisfactory neighbor because tenants never stay long on one place; consequently they can not take part in co- operative activities or take an interest in the general improvement of the farming community. The whole nation loses by having about 50 in every 100 of its farniers denied a fair return for their labor and by the soil robbing that goes on under our tenant system. 2 The prosperous tenant farmer is such a rare ani- mal that when our junker class finds one, he is imme- .diately written up in the kept agricultural papers as a good example. Yet the average tenant is a hard-working man with a hard-working family as well. He wants prosperity and tries to pay the price for it, but he is always bailing up prosperity with a sieve. On the other hand he is not a soil robber by choice. Also the landlord doesn’t like to tear down his farm. What then is the matter? Obviously it is the system under which the tenant is leasing and oper- ating the farm. We took our land laws in the early days as was natural directly from England, laws made by a landed aristocracy for exploiting tenants, and we have never taken the trouble to amend these laws as England and nearly every country in _-Burope with similar laws originally have done. ‘We haven't amended these old laws, perhaps be- - cause our public domain kept down tenancy until after 1880. Now, however, with the’ public land about all appropriated the need for change is, very great. The beast is upon us. Here in free America we have reproduced almost without a variation the essence of what two generations ago was known to us as the “bitter wrongs of Ireland.” There was this great Irish land question at that time, not be- ‘cause the landlords were of another nationality or because they were worse than landlords in Amer- ica,”but because the system under which they oper- ated gave the landlord such power for exploiting ~ the tenant that few were unselfish enough to re- frain from using it for all it was worth. Ours also is not a system of tenancy but of rack remting. 'WHERE THE TENANT IS HANDICAPPED From the point of view of the tenant our land . laws are bad in three important ways: _The tenant’s capital is unprotected. . His tenure is insecure and generally short. The landlerd has power to raise rents arbitrarily. - If the tenant makes any permanent improvement on the farm it reverts to the landlord without com- If he is so foolish as to spend labor and capital in fertilizing the fields, that, too, goes to the owner of the land on the expiration of the lease. If he were fo raise dairy cattle or stock, the resulting increase in the fertility of the farm, which makes diversified farm- ing pay-the land-owning farmer, is lost to him. Banks will not. lend him money- for improvements, of course, because his title to them passes before he can get more than a part of their benefit or value. Consequently the tenant can never get the ad- vantage arising from a judicious-combination - of capital with labor. Farming can not be make suc- cessful on a‘one-year basis. Hog raising offers a ers and fa good example of this. In the Northwest, at least, hog raisers find it very desirable to turn the hogs into alfalfa lots and to let them hog down corn. . This practice requires a good wire fence, but how can the tenant farmer operating on the one-year lease afford to build such a fence? It will pay for itself within two or three years at the most, but he has only one year of use. The next year, if he : All of a Kind There was me and pap, and some more of the crowd, Was settin’ around in Jimmerson’s store, h When Bill Hawkins told a tale he ’lowed Would set the fellers all in a roar. Says he: “When I was out in the West, Along on the edge of loway, T knowed a feller there that made A hundred dollars in half a day. “The old Missoo’ got on a raise— A regular old Missouri flood— An’ this feller thinks he sees a chance In catchin’ floatin’ logs of wood. “So he advertised for fifty men In the Roarin’ City Weekly News To meet him on the river bank With skiffs an’ boats, or with canoes. “An’. he hired them fellers to ketch that wood, An’ all that mornin’ the wood they fetched, An’ the pay he gave’s where the joke came in— He gave them half of what they ! ketched.” : : And -the fellers laughed at old Billy’s yarn, Laughed and said they thought it : grand— Yet all-of them fellers that cackled so : Was workin’ on shares on rented land! . —Indianapolis Journal. does not move, the landlord would raise the rent ! because there are fences on the place. If the tenant were sure of being able to stay on the farm for a long time or as long as he wanted to stay, he would soon be farming the way the farm owners do. He would borrow and earn capital. He would build up rather than destroy the farm. He would take a lively inter- est in community matters. He would have a home rather than a temporary.camping place. What really makes his tenure short is the ° landlord’s arbitrary power to raise rents, In fact, the three objections to our present sys- tem are so bound together that they can not be separated even for discussion and no one can be effectively removed without removing all three. If ~ . the tenant has bad luck or makes bad mistakes, he - - must, of course, leave the place; on the contrary, if ¢s and they will have to fight hard. ~ he does well, the rent will go up from one-fourth to one-third the crop, from one-third to two-fifths, from two-fifths to one-half, ete. The bad luck thus goes to the tenant; the good fortune and the ten- ant’s ability go to the landlord. : WHAT OTHER COUNTRIES HAVE DONE FOR TENANTS The Irish land question, which caused so much emigration to America, was practically settled over a generation ago by laws which gave the tenant security of tenure as against the landlord. If a landlord there today were to try to force up the rent arbitrarily or threaten expulsion from the land, the tenant would bring him into court for disturbance. What the tenant adds to the farm in the way of permanent improve- ments, including fertility and drainage, belongs to him. - When he wishes to leave, the landlord must buy him out or the tenant sells to a third . party. Thus the.tenant in time may have as big a property interest in the farm as the owner of the land by virtue of his improvements —an impossible thing in America. England and Scotland have laws guaranteeing this right to bring a case for disturbance. Even more important is what has been done in Frange, Denmark, Switzerland and New Zealand. The reforms in the British Isles raised the tenant to a much higher level but still kept him a tenant; the reforms in these other countries have made him a land-owning farmer. What Denmark has done, for instance, is described by Frederic C. Howe in his book, “The High Cost of Living,” as follows: “Fifty years ago Denmark was divided into great estates as still is a great part of Europe. The feudal system had survived. The great land own- ers, the titled nobility of the country, ruled parlia- ment in their own interests. They shifted the taxes onto the peasants. They kept them in ignorance. They refused to ameliorate the condition of the agricultural worker, who was little better than-a serf. Denmark was a landed oligarchy, the upper house of parliament being a kind of house of lords. “All this has been changed. The Danish farmer is no longer a tenant. He owns his own farm. And being an owning farmer, he has every stimulus .and ambition to improve his farm. In this he is like the French, Swiss and Dutch peasant. Today 90 per cent of the farmers of Denmark own their own farms as compared with 63 per cerit in the United States.” : When New Zealand was first opened up to settle- ment, the landed aristocracy in England planned to reproduce another England in the South Seas. New Zealand land was divided into vast estates and turn- ed over to the younger sons of the nobility. Poor settlers found it practically impossible to get land of theiri own although nearly all of it was unoc- cupied. This state of affairs lasted until 1890 when the common people there got their eyes open suf- ficiently to seize the political power. easy to drive the big land speculators out by taxa- tion. When the would-be founders of a landed aristocracy found that they could not afford to hold land out of use because of the taxes they had to pay, they sold out to the state or to small proprie- tors wanting to use land. LAND SPECULATION MAKES i - TENANT FARMERS Due to the profit which some make by holding land out of use and which many more think they are going to make, and due to the increment in value which some landlords get in spite of the fact that their land is being run down by the tenant -system, few would-be farmers can afford to buy The farmers of this generation ought to be sufficiently wise to solve the growing problem of farm tenan%y. Shas - | has gotten so big that every one can see it. Neither this generation of farmers nor the one to come can find any- . | thing but loss init. The profits from it such as there are go to those who are farming the farmers. At the rate we - are going toward tenaney our farmers will not be able to leave to their children a fair democratic opportunity for livelihood but something quite different—thesnecessity of working for the men who have put many broad acres together as hired men or tenants. The men who have controlled our politics show by their failure to do any- g to aid the fenant farmer or to reduce farm tenancy their inability to govern wisely for work- . = ~ers and farmers. If the farmers want any reform-in the tenancy system they will have to oy get it by taking a hand in politi Lenan Then it was . i R RRAT RS