Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/253

Rh a certain reserve capital beyond the necessities of each day's living. To save one dollar is better than to earn ten. An indispensable prerequisite to the progress of any people is their learning, by self-denial, to save from this year's consumption something of this year's product. Those farmers who learned this lesson have emerged to a greater or less degree from the shackles of the usurious lien system, and in many instances what formerly went in 80 per cent, interest to the advancing merchant is now drawing 4-per cent, in the savings bank.

Some explanation is necessary of the southern people's continuing a system so bad. It is favored by a large class who could, by proper exertions, live without it, but whose indolence deters them from the supreme effort which would assure their ultimate prosperity; and by a still larger class, generally tenants, whose unfitness to manage farms would require them to become hired laborers if they could not get supplies in advance under the lien law. Thus the system is an evil in three ways: it puts land under the management of earth butchers who destroy the natural resources of the country and reduce its production of wealth; it leads men capable of better into a system of indolence, destroys their credit and self-respect, and robs them of interest in their lifework; and lastly, it proves a terrible master to the man who has once fallen into its subtle, tightening embrace, and who desires independence and progress.

The development of farm tenures in the south has been from simple to complex. Before the war the system of ownership was dominant; but within that there were two classes—owners who attended to their estates and owners who committed them to salaried managers. Managers, once so common, now operate less than one in a hundred farms in the south—a smaller proportion than in any other section of the union. A southern farmer who is sufficiently trustworthy to have extensive lands committed to his care will give his employer no rest until he consents to sell; or failing in that direction, he buys some old plantation whose proprietor family has either become extinct or moved away in their itching for town life.

The impoverishment of the large planters and the disorganization of the labor force by the war of secession necessitated large plantations being broken up into units sufficiently small to be operated on a limited capital and with a minimum of laborers. Between 1868 and 1873 in Georgia, 32,824 small farms were thus created, and the same process was in operation throughout the south. Thus the immediate tendency of the war was to the distribution of the land in small tracts into more hands; and in this was cause for gratulation; for not only did it open immense new possibilities of social progress and industrial in