Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/254

250 dependence to thousands of white men whose lives had been one of woeful sacrifice to the slave-worked plantation economy, the tragedy of whose wretched existence has never yet been written, but it was calculated vastly to increase the wealth of the country; for, to a point not yet reached in the United States, the productiveness of farms rises exactly as their acreage decreases.

But no sooner had the more enterprising of the southern population begun to succeed than the tendency to a wider distribution of land met a counter tendency towards the increase in the size of estates, doubly augmented by the prosperity of some and the misfortunes of others. It may be safely asserted that to-day the best type of southern farmer either owns a large estate, or is paying for tracts recently added to his plantation, or is expecting to make such additions. He has set a thousand acres as the goal of his ambition. In many localities this feeling has grown into such an insatiable land hunger on the part of wealthy planters as seriously to handicap young farmers who have not inherited property.

One bulwark protects, but not completely, the country from serious injury from this tendency: there are so many men with this same ambition and with the same chances for gratifying it.

The vast majority of southern farmers, 93$1/2$ per cent., are included in the three classes of owners, cash tenants and share tenants. Owners operate 47 per cent. of the whole number of farms; cash tenants 17$1/2$ per cent., and share tenants 29$1/2$ per cent. The desirability of these three classes is in the order of their enumeration, as is also their wealth-producing capacity, even to a degree beyond what appears from glancing at the figures. It is the universal rule that small farms of any given tenure are more productive than large farms; so that when we consider that notwithstanding the fact that cash tenant farms are one third larger than share farms and owner-operated farms are two and one third times larger than share farms, yet the productivity of owners and of cash tenants exceeds that of share tenants, while that of owners almost equals that of the much smaller cash-tenanted farms, the relative superiority of the different forms of tenure is more thoroughly revealed.

 Average size of farms operated by white farmers of all tenures, 173 A. """""colored""""53 A.