Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/250

246 as the total value of farm products in the state of Georgia; while the total value of all Iowa's farm products lacks only one third of one per cent, of equaling the combined totals of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Only Texas can compare in the volume of her agricultural output with this banner state of the northwest, and even she falls short more than $135,580,000.

We must concede, therefore, that the south occupies the second place among the great geographical divisions of the country as a producer of agricultural wealth.

The condition of the southern farmer has immensely improved in the last ten years. To-day he stands, for the first time since the war of secession, in a position promising permanent betterment of his farming and of his social position. Until recent years three causes, any one of which was a fearful incubus, combined to pull him down, viz., low prices, the lien system and bad farming, including under this head poor management and antiquated methods.

Scarcely any impediment is heavier to bear up against than producing for a long term of years for a continuously falling market. Sir Guildford Molesworth estimates that between the years 1872 and 1894 the prices of general commodities fell 50 per cent.; the price of wheat 60 per cent.; that of cotton 70 per cent. In manufactures this depression of prices was in large measure offset by new inventions and economies in production; but the agriculturist, from the nature of his occupation, is almost entirely cut off from such retreats.

To add to the hardship of his salable commodity's constantly falling in price at a rate so rapid that we may say that the value of his cotton appreciably diminished even while the boll expanded, the southern farmer was drawn by circumstances into doing business under a system which subjected him to a ruinous usury and left him almost completely robbed of his freedom as to planting profitable or unprofitable crops. Along with the rest of the structure of southern industry, the war of secession shattered the system of agricultural credit. There was no longer a class of large planters possessed of valuable estates to whom banks of immense capital or wealthy factors stood ready to lend at fair interest. Ready money existed only in the traditions of the past; the southern farmer found himself without the means to buy even the seed to put into the ground. Then the crop lien law came to his assistance and remained to his destruction.

This system of industrial peonage known as the lien law works as follows: The farmer prepares in February for planting. He goes to the proprietor of an establishment, which in its typical form is a