Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/510

494 finds that six hundred and fifty farms make an average profit of $551.36, and that forty-two sustain an average loss of $232.45. The average size of the farms reported on was one hundred and ten acres.

I can not agree with Mr. Hotchkiss that the family expenses ought to be deducted in estimating the profits, unless an allowance is made on the other side of the ledger for wages of the family. The children of farmers begin to work as early as ten or twelve years of age. Therefore, the first cited computation of the profits of farming in Connecticut is the nearer to the truth. The footings, as summarized by the commissioner, are as follows:

Among the farm expenses we find the gross sum of $37,526 set down to taxes and insurance, but there is no separation of the taxes from the insurance. It is apparent that if the gross sum of $16,163 had been added to the tax bills of these farmers, it would have taken not only the whole of the economic rent, but the profits on their capital besides. The statistics in hand lead me to believe that the single-tax theory is already in operation in rural Connecticut, “unbeknownst” to its advocates—that is, that economic rent is wholly taken by the tax-gatherer from agricultural land plus something from the returns of the farmers' capital invested in live stock, implements, and “distinguishable betterments,” which the theory requires us to exclude from the list of taxables. Live stock, farming utensils, and wagons are shown in the report to be sixteen per cent of the farmer's capital, the real estate being eighty-four per cent. But the real estate includes buildings of every description, fences, drains, wells, and every kind of improvement.

If this is the true state of the case in one of the most densely populated States of the Union, where shall we look for the revenue that is to liberate all other industry from taxation and abolish poverty throughout the land? I know something about farming in the West, some years of my life having been spent on a farm in a then frontier State, where the conditions were substantially the same as those now prevailing in Dakota and Nebraska. I know that my step-father, the owner of the hundred and sixty acres under cultivation, had hard work to make ends meet in a very economical way, although he had a family of willing helpers. Tea and coffee were luxuries never seen in the household. Only one hired man was ever employed on the place, except in harvest-time. Thus the wages bill was kept down to a minimum.