rose. The result was the buying up of
the small farms, whose owners, seduced by the high prices, allowed
themselves to be inveigled into selling. While the land was thus being
used for industrial speculation, the raising of potatoes and grain was
being confined to narrower fields, hence the increasing need of
importation of food from abroad. The demand exceeds the supply.
Thereupon, the large supply of foreign farm products and their cheaper
transportation from Russia, the Danubian Principalities, North and South
America, India, etc., finally leads to prices on which the domestic
farmers--weighed down with mortgages and taxes, and hampered by the
smallness of their farms, and their often faultily organized and
deficiently conducted farming--can no longer exist. High duties are then
placed upon importations; but these duties accrue only to the large
farmer; the small fellow profits little by them, or none at all; and
they become heavy burdens to the non-agricultural population. The
advantage of the few becomes the injury of the many; small farming
retrogresses; for it there is no balm in Gilead. That the condition of
the small peasants in the tariff areas of Germany has been steadily
deteriorating, will be generally admitted. The advantages to the large
farmer from high duties, prohibitions of importations and measures of
exclusion enable him all the more easily to buy out the small holder.
The large number of those who do not produce in meat and bread what they
consume themselves--and a glance at the statistics of occupation and
division of the soil shows that these are by far the larger majority of
the farmers--even suffers a direct injury from the increased prices
resulting upon higher tariffs and indirect taxes. An unfavorable crop,
that lowers still more the returns from the farm, not only aggravates
the pressure, but also increases the number of the agriculturists who
are compelled to become purchasers of farm products themselves. Tariffs
and indirect taxes can not improve the economic condition of the
majority of the farmers: he who has little or nothing to sell, what, to
him, does the tariff boot, be it never so high! The incumbrance of the
small farmer and his final ruin are thereby promoted rather than
checked.

For Baden--overwhelmingly a State of small farms--the increase of
mortgage indebtedness during the period of 1884-1894 is estimated at 140
to 150 million marks. The mortgage indebtedness of the Bern pea