tions of class-distinction, has
come to the country side in increasing numbers. And slowly but
gradually a landed aristocracy is growing up in rural America as
marked as the landed aristocracy based on the purchase of a few acres
of Manhattan Island several generations ago. And with the tenant has
come the farm laborer, alien to the community, transient, and as much
a member of the proletariat as if he were working in a great factory
in the city. The I. W. W. movement in the wheat fields and lumber
camps of the Northwest is but the beginning of the wage-earning
consciousness as it spreads out from urban centers.

The short term of tenant operation is lowering the standards of
agriculture. Instead of farming on a long-time schedule, expecting
returns on a system of husbandry reaching through the years, the
tenant is inclined to produce such crops as can be disposed of at the
close of the year, regardless of the effect of such a form of
agriculture upon the fertility of the soil. Tenant contracts as yet
offer little inducement for the tenant to remain permanently on a
given farm or to keep up needed improvements.

The tenant for the time being may even make larger profits as a tenant
than as an owner. But the tendency everywhere for rents to rise, and
the consequent increase in the value of the land, will ultimately
bring the tenant to the position of securing from his labor on the
farm an income not much in excess of what he would receive from
working as a day laborer. The result in the long run will be that the
best agricultural sections of the country will be occupied by a
population lower in ability than in a landowning section and
constantly kept down by poverty. This prediction may be deemed
fanciful by some, but the writer believes that it is worthy of the
most careful consideration and study.

Since the organization of the great combinations in the oil and sugar
industries during the 70's and 80's of the past century the movement
toward close industrial organization has proceeded with little
interruption. Legislation has been passed designed to break up
industrial combinations and from time to time various industries have
been disintegrated. But the layman has not been able to discover that
such disintegrations by court order have had any marked influence on
the progress of the fundamental tendencies toward industrial
consolidation. The farmers have been the last to get into the
organization field on any exten