Page:Evolution of American Agriculture (Woodruff).djvu/61

Rh At least, scientific research and methods have finally brought the art of agriculture to a paying basis and the up-to-date farmer, equipped with a scientific education and technical training steps forward very much in advance of the so-called business men and intellectuals of the rural towns.

This period, just now closing, is really too near to us to properly evaluate its material achievements. Socially, it has been a period of concentration; the open spaces have been populated and the dissimilar elements of the people so pressed together as to produce crystalization—the American type is commencing to appear. Economically the line of cleavage between the farmer and the farm laborer has widened into a gulf, across which they glare at each other in uncompromising hostility. Also, the question of agricultural finance as opposed to commercial finance has come up for a final solution. The borrowing farmers have forced upon the statute books the Rural Credit Act, hoping thereby to achieve financial equality between the agricultural and other industrial interests, but these hopes are illusory.

With the great increase in farm values caused by the inflation due to the war, the expectations of the tenant class to become land-owners through the Rural Credit Banks are doomed to disappointment. Instead of creating an era of small farms, the tendency is for the big farmer to finance further purchases of land through the credit banks, and these are a decided tendency towards concentration. The "Land Trust" is well upon the way.

The universal application of machinery to agriculture has definitely industrialized farming and created three distinct classes in the rural regions—the