Agrarianism

“ If the capital of the farmer is sufficient to enable him to farm upon a large scale, he divides his labourers; and one becomes a shepherd, one a ploughman,—one sows the ground, and one washes and shears the sheep, more skilfully than another. If he has a considerable farm, he divides his land, also, upon the same principle, and has pasture, and arable, and rotation of crops. By these divisions he is enabled to manufacture wool cheaper than the farmer upon a small scale, who employs one man to do everything, and has not a proper proportion of pasture and arable, or a due rotation of crops. ”

“ Agriculture in the slave states may be characterized in general by two epithets, extensive, exhaustive,—which in all agricultural countries forebode two things, impoverishment, depopulation. The general system of slaveholding farmers and planters, in all times and places, has been, and now is, and ever will be, to cultivate much land, badly, for present gain,—in short, to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. ”

“ All men carry on agriculture by means of slaves or freemen or both. The freemen who cultivate the land do so either on their own account, as do many poor people with the aid of their own children, or for wages, [74] as when the heaviest farm operations, like the vintage and the harvest, are accomplished with the aid of hired freemen: in which class may be included those bond servants whom our ancestors called obaerati, a class which may still be found in Asia, in Egypt and in Illyricum. ”

“ It is rather remarkable that in a country where the peasant—placed as he is next to the soldier, and before the artisan and merchant, in the four classes into which the people are divided—enjoys no small consideration, and where agriculture is protected by law from the inroads of wild vegetation, even to the lopping of overshadowing branches and the cutting down of hedgerow timber, the lord of the manor should be left practically without control in his dealings with his people. ”

“ The agrarian revolution introduced by the transfer of church properties to laymen was accompanied by enclosures and a widespread tendency to shift from an uneconomical crop economy to an agriculture governed by business principles. ”

“ England, which a few centuries before had been overcrowded with fewer than four million people, was now more bountifully feeding and clothing forty millions. Perhaps, all in all, mankind was better off than it had ever been before; yet different groups maintained unequal progress. The tillers of the soil as a whole remained more nearly in their primitive condition than did the dwellers of the city. The farmer, it is true, produced a greater yield of crops, was surrounded by more comforts, and was able to enjoy greater leisure than his kind had ever done before. ”

“ Settlers would pour off to the West, and drain the juices of the fertile land by cropping it year after year without fallow, without manure, and then, as the land became in a few years exhausted, would have nowhere whither to turn to find the fertilizers which the soil would need. Were they to depend upon agriculture alone, they would sweep in a wave across the land, leaving behind them a worn-out, depopulated, jungle-covered soil, open to future settlement, when its lands should have recovered their fertility, by some other and more provident race. ”

“ One laborer assists another, and the implements of tillage, the numerous tools, stores, and animals employed, the variety of products and the various arts which agriculture calls to its aid, establish necessary relations between the inhabitants of a valley and make it indispensable for them to have a rudiment of a town to serve as a centre. Moreover, the cares and occupations of agriculture require such a number of hands that idleness becomes impossible, and the men of an estate are compelled to remain within its limits. ”

“ Now, in this process, the roads, fields and meadows which lie between the giant city and the villages get covered over like a river-bed with a deposit of stone-paving; and consequently the operations of agriculture can no longer be carried on otherwise than in flower-pots in the windows. Where there is no agriculture, I cannot see what the agricultural population can become but unemployed idlers, such as no state allows within its boundaries ”

“ What made the new methods of agriculture not simply an important technical advance in the utilisation of the soil, but the beginning of a social revolution, was the insecurity of the tenure of large numbers of the peasantry, in the absence of which they might gradually have adapted themselves to the altered conditions, without any overwhelming shock to rural life such as was produced by the evictions and by the loss of rights of common. ”

“ Is that, or can that be made—supposing that it generally exists—an argument for a repeal of the corn-laws? If the condition of the labouring man be now indifferent, what will it become if you deprive him of that employment from which he now derives his subsistence? Agriculture is subject to the operation of the laws which govern every branch of industrial labour. ”

“ And so it has happened that those lands which the shepherds who founded the city taught their children to cultivate are now, by their later descendants, converted again from corn fields back to pastures, thus in their greed of gain violating even the law, since they fail to distinguish the difference between agriculture and grazing. ”

“ Without homesteads, with no prospect of anything but unsatisfying labor, with scarce the surety of earning a scanty subsistence,—there is, among the common people, a lack of interest in agricultural efforts. Thousands of laborers leave this land, the fairest on which God's impartial sun shines; few are left to care for the soil; and so, as the shortest cut across this field of deliberately created difficulty, nearly all the land is laid down to grass. In our ride of more than one hundred miles, hardly one fruit-tree was seen, or one nice garden. ”

“ Many intelligent writers have condemned the wasteful methods of colonial agriculture, but they have failed to consider the fact that land was cheaper than labor and we only economize in that of which we have a scarcity. ”

“ Few of those who live in cities, villages, or other places than those where agricultural pursuits prevail; few of those, indeed, who have been tillers only of the subdued and time-mellowed soils of the old States and countries, have any adequate conception of the immense amount of hard labor required to clear off the primitive forest, and prepare the land for the first crop ”

“ No change for the better to record in agriculture, the farms still overstocked with horses, black cattle and men, the fishing still all but neglected, hovels wretched as ever, and clothes as tattered and scanty—nothing in short to be seen but want and wretchedness, with apparently no inclination in the people to better their condition. ”

“ The fertility of the soil is not exhausted; and more labour is to be had. All cultivable land is not under tillage; neither have the hills and marshes reached their limit of production; neither has every available idler put his hand to the plough.
Crime begins in poverty; poverty in insufficiency of food; insufficiency of food in neglect of agriculture. ”

“ The town money owners, instead of exploiting their peasant debtors any further, go to work to drive them from their possessions, to unite into great plantations, and to introduce slave work for the peasant, without any change being required in the tools and instruments of agriculture.
Finally, we see a fourth type of peasant development in inaccessible mountain regions. The soil there is poor and difficult to cultivate. By the side of agriculture, the breeding of stock retains the preponderance. ”

“ In the Middle States and in the North where general farming was practised, there was no genuinely rural proletariat, for the reason that the lands were cheap and the undeveloped West was open to every man who had sufficient knowledge of agriculture and enough energy to devote himself to the conquest of the soil. ”

“ Our first settler's land being the centre of population, the store, the blacksmith's forge, the wheelwright's shop, are set up on it, or on its margin, where soon arises a village, which rapidly grows into a town, the centre of exchanges for the people of the whole district. With no greater agricultural productiveness than it had at first, this land now begins to develop a productiveness of a higher kind. To labour expended in raising corn, or wheat, or potatoes, it will yield no more of those things than at first. ”

“ Let none of your readers set down to the account of such a feeling my present warning as to the wholesale system of ejectment that is now in preparation." "The potato cultivation being extinguished, at least for a time, the peasant cultivators can pay no rents; sheep and horned cattle can pay rents, and smart rents too; therefore the sheep and cattle shall have the lands, and the peasants shall be ousted from them; a very simple and most inevitable conclusion, as you see." "I repeat it, a universal system of ousting the peasantry is about to set in. ”

“ It is impossible to acquire a keen and permanent interest in the rural problem unless one first of all is cognizant of its significance. And lack of knowledge at this point may in part account for the fact already alluded to that in America the farm problem has not been adequately studied. So stupendous has been the development of our manufacturing industries, so marvelous the growth of our urban population, so pressing the questions raised by modern city life, that the social and economic interests of the American farmer have, as a rule, received minor consideration. ”

“ The most representative farming communities today are those of Scotch or Scotch-Irish people, whose instinctive tenacity, their "clannishness," has perpetuated longer than in other instances the rural economy and the country community.
In using the term land-farmer I am aware of its close resemblance to the term exploiter. The word itself points to exploitation of land. The land farmer has used the raw materials of the country. ”

“ Precisely because it is new, it is of the greatest economic significance. It shows what may be called, by contrast with later developments, the old agrarian régime, producing the new type of well-to-do peasant who is one of the protagonists in the class struggles of the sixteenth century. ”

“ The first agricultural group will contain those cases, in which agriculture holds a subordinate place, most of the subsistence being derived from other sources, viz. hunting, fishing or gathering wild-growing vegetable food34. The tribes of the second group carry on agriculture to a considerable extent, but not to the exclusion of hunting, etc. The third, or highest, agricultural stage is reached, when agriculture is by far the principal mode of subsistence, and hunting, etc. ”

“ Speculation in land has been creating a class of non-resident agricultural capitalists and tenant cultivators, and has been transforming the type of agricultural population over large sections of country. Soil exhaustion is leading to abandonment of the poorest land and is compelling methods of scientific agriculture on the remainder. These conditions are producing their own social problems for the rural community. ”

“ Such a decrease as this in the value of one's crop and the steady increase at the same time of a slave population, now numbering between 700 and 800 bodies to clothe and house,—mouths to feed, while the land is being exhausted by the careless and wasteful nature of the agriculture itself, suggests a pretty serious prospect of declining prosperity ”

“ The unprecedented prosperity, especially among the farmers, which began with the closing years of the nineteenth century and has continued with little reaction down to the present has removed many causes for agrarian discontent ”

“ A more fertile soil, and a more productive country, so fas as it is cultivated, there is not, we believe, on the face of the earth. Its hills and its plains are covered with a verdure which never fades; the productions of nature keep on in their growth through all seasons of the year. Even the natives of the country, almost without farming tools, without skill, and with very little labor, make more grain and vegetables than they can consume, and often more than they can sell. ”

“ Those who had the making of the settlements, and the governing of these new territories, did not consider that the diminution of every establishment was the removal of a market—of an effectual demand for land produce; and that when all the waste lands should be brought into tillage, the whole would deteriorate in fertility, from the want of fallows, under the prevailing system of agriculture, which afforded the lands no other means of renovation from over cropping. ”

“ The Slave States boast of agriculture; but here again, notwithstanding superior natural advantages, they must yield to the Free States at every point,—in the number of farms and plantations, in the number of acres improved, in the cash value of farms, in the average value per acre, and in the value of farming implements and machinery. ”

“ The peasant, whose pigs, and cow, and poultry had been sold or had died, because the commons were gone where they had fed—the yeoman dispossessed of his farm—the farm servant out of employ, because where ten ploughs had turned the soil one shepherd now watched the grazing of the flocksthe artisan smarting under the famine prices which the change of culture had brought with it:all these were united in suffering ”