Page:Oscar Ameringer - Socialism for the Farmer (1912).djvu/27

 his five children three have moved to the city. "Minnie married a drummer. Joe is pilot of a street car and Jennie is a manicurist on her own hook. Fred and John work the home place. Each one of the five children have a $2000.00 equity in the farm. Fred and John, the two farmers, borrow $6000.00 to bay off the three children in the city. To do this they place a mortgage on the home place. And now commences a heart breaking struggle for the two young farmers. The interest amounts to $360.00 per year at 6 per cent interstinterest [sic]. Taxes on a $10,000.00 farm are not less than $200.00 per annum. Before these two boys can have a dollar for themselves, they must raise $560.00 for the banker and the politician. If everything goes well they may be able to pay off that mortgage by the time they are old and gray, after having paid interest alone three times the value of the place.

But if things go wrong, and they happen to go wrong oftener than they go right, those two boys will have a mortgage foreclosed, and next year they make a share crop on the old homestead.

Half the homes in our towns are built with money scratched out of the soil by the children who remain on the farm, and most of the small merchants buy their first stock of goods with their share of dad's estate. That this share is also scratched out of the soil by Fred and John, the farmers, does not seem to interest anybody in particular. Rising land values and the laws of inheritance are great factors in the transformation of the land-owning farmers into renters.

There are other factors that help along, but this is not an encyclopedia, but a pamphlet, consequently somethings must be left out. I have only touched upon the effect of high land values on the farmer to induce him to shake the capitalist out of his brain tank.

Landlordism is rapidly increasing in the United States since Uncle Sam hasn't any more land to spend, and the best government on earth, while doing nothing against the coming slavery, is at least kind enough to tell us of the progress we aremaking. Here are a few census figures: