ars per acre.

It is not generally understood that this exploitation of farm lands has
extended over nearly the whole country. Its spread is increasingly
rapid in the last two years. In the Gulf States and the Carolinas and in
Tennessee and Kentucky prices of farm land have increased in the last
five years from twenty-five to one hundred per cent. Even in the most
conservative counties in Pennsylvania the prices of farm land have
increased twenty to twenty-five per cent.

The sign of this exploitation is a rapid increase in the market values
of farm land, due to frequent sale and purchase. This increase is
independent of any increase in essential value to the farmer. The net
income of the farmer may have been increased only five per cent, as in
the State of Indiana, whereas the values of farm land have increased in
the same period more than one hundred per cent. That is, the speculative
increases have been twenty times as much as the agricultural increase.

Along with this change in farm values goes the increase or decrease in
the number of tenant farmers and the shifting of the ownership of land
to farm landlords. In some parts of the country this exploitation has
taken a purely speculative form. In all parts it is speculative in
character, but in some sections of the country the exploiters are
themselves farmers and the process is imposed upon the farmers
themselves by economic causes. This is true of the Illinois and Indiana
lands, which are under the influence of a system of drainage, but there
are other portions of the country in which the process is chiefly
speculative. In some Western States the exploitation of farm land is in
the hands of speculators themselves, doing real estate business purely
as a matter of trade. It would be a mistake, however, to attribute a
process so general as this one to the power exerted by a class of real
estate agents. Its causes are deeper than the commercial process. They
go into the very roots of modern life. This should be clearly
understood, because when frankly realized it compels the adjustment of
social, educational and religious work to the period of exploitation.

The effect of this process is upon all the life of country people. It
has created its own class of men. There was no intention in the mind of
earlier Americans that we should ever have a tenant class in America.
The assumption on which all our ideals are built has been that we would
be a land-owning people, but