Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/252

248 generally. The lien, at least in some states, contains a clause requiring the farmer to enter into a similar agreement the next year with the deficit charged against him if he does not succeed in paying out the first year's account.

The iniquity of such a system is exceeded only by the suffering of the farmer under it. To observe its operation makes plain the ground for the Biblical injunction given three thousand years ago to an agricultural people against usury. And the pathos of the lien farmer is that he is always only twelve months from freedom. Better that he should eat but one coarse meal a day and wear his cheap clothes to the last frazzle of decency, and by one unremitted struggle break his chains.

This lien system goes far to account for the amazing fact a few years ago of the southern farmer's persistently planting a full acreage of cotton in the face of an already glutted market. Those who then berated him for his folly little understood his predicament. For the southern cotton farmer, cotton is the only money crop; but for it there is absolutely certain sale, for there exists from the field to the factory a market unexcelled for its thorough and sensitive organization in the commerce of the world. Government bonds can sooner fail of a purchaser than can a bale of cotton. When a lien merchant sells goods with cotton as security, he sells practically for gold paid in hand and by the same act invests his gold at an enormously profitable dividend. If cotton has fallen in price, the merchant requires the farmer to increase his acreage, as more bales are necessary to equal a given sum; and as the farmer's necessities do not diminish with the price of his product, he submits; and so we behold the paradox of men's planting more and more of a certain crop for the sole reason that to plant it is becoming less and less desirable.

The effect produced upon the character of a people by rack rent is well known; v/here the tenant promises a rent equaling or exceeding the surplus product of the land above what is necessary to keep him alive, he has no inducement to good farming, as the total surplus produced will be taken from him whether it be great or small. His fields present the most miserable appearance. The same is true of the farmer whose lien just suffices to secure on credit the bare necessities of food, clothing and farming material. Not infrequently he even neglects to harvest his crop, and the merchant has to send his own men to pick it from the field.

The hard times from 1891 to 1896 were of incalculable benefit to many southern farmers. The terrible experience of usury, depressed prices and industrial peonage led many to resolve to be free from the lien system; and the enforced economy of those years taught how alone that resolution might be realized, viz., by the accumulation of