Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/585

Rh from adopting methods formerly described by Governor Wise of Virginia, as that of slavery, when he said that 'the white men skinned the nigger and the nigger skinned the land' There is an element of, skinning in every system relating to land not born of perfect freedom. Perfect freedom in the purchase and rental of American land leads to constant improvement.

Under the freedom of sale which prevails in the United States, with the facility of mortgage loans which permits the poor man to use the capital of the rich to secure for himself a farm, there will always be a large mortgage debt in the rural sections of the United States. That debt marks, as a rule, the upward movement of the poor laborer on the road of farm ownership. One class of men incur debt for land purchased or for improvements, and pay off the same, and as they retire in old age another and younger set repeat the process of rising to independence by the same road. The relative number of those who have attained their goal and of those on the way may be seen by the following figures:

Of the farms in the twelve States named, about sixty to sixty-five per cent, are now free from mortgage debt, and thirty-five to forty per cent, are mortgaged. The debt on the mortgaged farms does not exceed thirty-five per cent, of their value, and the total mortgage debt of the States is not in excess of about twelve to fifteen per cent, of the whole farm value.

Under these conditions the area of land devoted to the several grain crops diminishes in ratio to that given to other crops, varied farming taking the place of the all-wheat or all-corn system. But by the introduction of intensive farming there is a steady improvement and increase in the quantity and the quality of the crops derived from a given area of soil. The wheat needed for home use will keep even with population for many years without any increase in area.

The most potent agency in this revolution in agriculture may be but little known in Europe, especially in England. I refer to the so-called Agricultural Experiment Stations, which have grown in a rather singular manner, of which no very definite record has yet been given. The general government appropriates annually $720,000, and the State governments $440,000, more or less, in addition, to be expended by the Agricultural Experiment Stations, under the general supervision of a special department in the Department of Agriculture, of which Professor A. C. True is now the director. But the general government has no very definite control over the expenditure of this money. The stations are established by the several States. They are now thirty-six in number—one in nearly every State; two or three in some of them. Each one is under the direction of a trained student of the science of dealing with land as an instrument or tool of