Doing business on credit

When I say that the conversation of these Arkansas farmers was more instructive than college lectures on economics, I mean that it gave a clearer and more accurate picture of vital things in the industrial situation. For example, when I asked about the amount of business done on credit, my host made it clear that it was less than in former years. He told me (and every old farmer, I find, has similar recollections) that he used to see less than fifty dollars a year, and that, toɔ, at a time when prices were much better than they are now. It used to be taken for granted, he said, that farmers would trade everything out. The first year he was on his present farm he put up a "box" house which cost him fifty dollars, and bought on credit all the supplies he could not raise himself. "When I sold my crops at the end of the year, I paid off the balance against me at the Greensboro' store. The next year the butter and eggs and grain I sold at the store amounted to more than I had bought, and when I asked for a settlement, the storekeeper said, Ah! what do you want money for? You can trade out what you want... . . Haven't time to figure it up now.' When I got home, I told my wife that we wouldn't buy anything more on credit, unless it was medicine. If we couldn't pay for things, we would do without them. From that day to this we haven't bought on credit." Cash sales, he went on, were becoming more and more the rule, though many of his neighbors still bought on credit. Even he used less money for all purposes than city wage-earners need for food alone, where he required none. Had a college professor told him that less money per capita is needed to-day than a generation ago, he would have been less willing to pay his school tax than he was already. When the question of farmers' debts Mortgages came up, the information I got and did not contradict ordinary debts teachings, but it gave a different color. The census returns, as is widely known, show that in Arkansas, as in most Southern States, only one family in nine carries a real estate mortgage. When, however, I asked my Arkansas acquaintances how many of the farmers were

"Nearly all." When I narrowed my question down to the school district, Mr. Ishmael said that out of twenty-eight farmers at the election the day before, ten were in debt to him in sums ranging from $10 to $200. Only one man, he said, was in debt for as much as his farm would bring, but nearly everybody was in debt in some quarter. In this case the census returns were absolutely accurate. There was hardly a mortgage in the district. But this was due to the fact that, even when land was sold on partial payments, a mortgage was not given, but a "title bond" was taken, by which the title remained with the seller until the last payment was made. When I returned to Jonesboro', the leading banker of the town explained the system to me more in full. If, he said, you lend money on a mortgage, and wish to foreclose, you have to wait six months for a Circuit Court decree which allows you to sell only on four months' notice, and even after the sale the borrower retains the option to redeem his property for another twelve months. The "title bond," on the other hand, enables you to re-enter the property whenever the borrower fails to make a payment, and sell it upon relatively short notice. The situation of the debtor, therefore, is harder than where mortgages are given; and the fact that there is only one mortgage in Arkansas where there are four in Vermont does not mean that the burden of debt is only one-fourth as serious. It rather means that the burden is four times as serious. The only relieving feature to the situation in Arkansas is that the usury law is rarely disobeyed. Very few loans, the banker told me, carry more than the legal rate of ten per cent.

There was

and heavy roads

Heavy road taxes

another matter of economic importance which the conversation of this long morning put before me more vividly than any college text-book. This was the burden of the road tax-a subject scarcely mentioned in political economies constructed after English models. It was natural that this subject should come up, for the road to the school-house the day before had been too much for even Arkansas patience to put up with, and Mr. Ishmael was anxious to get help in patching up some of the worst places. The

law, I learned, is that every man between eighteen and forty-five has to give five days' labor to the public roads. Nearly one week's work out of fifty-two must be given to the public in this way. The private roads, of course, require extra work from the men whose lands they run through. But on the public roads the tax is precisely the same for the man who owns fifty acres, or even five, as for the man who owns five hundred. That there is no justice about such a tax requires no argument, as it is obvious that the wealthy man has ten or a hundred times his neighbor's ability to pay, and receives ten or a hundred times as much benefit from the improve

ment.

Road taxes, as Western common sense recognized long before the single tax was ever heard of, ought to rest exclusively upon the abutting land owners in direct proportion to the amount of land, because, unlike other taxes, they are apt to add their amount to the value of the land. Here in Arkansas, however-and I found the system general in the Souththe same contribution is exacted from the mere wage-earners, even, as from the largest landowners. I inquired of my host whether there was no protest against its injustice, and he replied that some of the poorer people did complain that it was unfair, but that it was the system everybody had always been used to, and not much was said about it. Of course it was the most wasteful system imaginable, as the repairs were apt to be made when it was convenient for the farmers and not when it was convenient for the roads. Indefinitely less work from men who understood the business would give far better roads. Yet, in spite of all the considerations of justice and economy and good roads, the reform was not pushed forward, because the financial interests of the leading citizens were opposed to it. In this respect primitive communities do not differ from others.

When the question of wages came up, Wages I received more testimony in line and with what I had learned at New earnings Bedford and Taunton. Mr. Ishmael, who was the only steady employer of labor in the group, said: "Fifteen or twenty years ago I used to pay $18 or $20 a month. Now I can get a good man for $10." In each case, of

course, these wages included board; but this must not be reckoned too high, for the school-teacher, I learned, who regularly boarded at the Dicksons' and occupied my comfortable room, paid $8 a month. A farm-hand's "keep " must be reckoned at a still lower sum. The wages of hired men tallied closely with the earnings of farmers. An energetic farmer who had a boy to help him could handle twenty-five acres in wheat, twenty-five in cotton, and twenty-five more in pastureeither clover or stock peas (the latter a splendid fertilizer). This was what a farmer should handle, rotating his crops in succession. Very few, however, gave their land any rest for pasture, and forty acres of cleared land was as much as most of them attempted to cultivate. The farmer who handled seventy-five acres would need $500 worth of stock and machinery-two horses, a cow or two, at least half a dozen pigs, and wagon, plows, harrows, and cultivators, as at the North; but he rarely would have a "binder." At the end of the year his cash returns would figure up in about this wise: 25 acres wheat, 250 bushels.... $125 25 acres corn, 250 bushels for stock, 500 bushels for sale...... 150

The drift to town

The tenant farmer, of course, has a money income much smaller. In case he furnishes all the stock and machinery, he gets two-thirds of the crop and the landlord one-third; but if the landlord furnishes the capital, and the tenant only the labor, they divide half and half.

"Sometimes," said Mr. Ishmael, "the tenant wants you to keep him in food while he raises the first crop; but if you have to trust a tenant for his keep, you don't want him. I wouldn't have such a man about, and neither would anybody else who knows his business."

"What becomes of such farmers?" I asked. "Oh," he replied, “when a man gets too poor to be a tenant, he goes to town." This observation was entirely new to me, but I have found it everywhere true. The towns are being recruited by those too poor to be able to live in the country, as well as by those too rich to be willing to live there; and this drifting helps make our urban districts the centers of both wealth and poverty, while the farming districts remain the strongholds of the independent middle classes.

Church affairs

When the time came for Sunday-school, we all went, and it seemed to me that all the young people for miles about must have done the same. The attendance was remarkable—the more so as the singing was ordinary, and the general conduct of the school spiritless. It was obvious that the church was the center of neighborhood life, but that the present was not a time of especial religious interest. The "protracted" meetings, I was told, had not yet begun, for these meetings were held in midsummer. Farm work, including clearing, was too heavy in midwinter to make a good attendance possible, while in midsummer there was a long leisure season, and the heat did not prevent the people from coming out. Apparently they all came, and the religious interest was at times almost universal. My farmer host, in speaking to me, not unkindly, of a young girl whose prettiness and boldness had commanded attention, said that her mother is a hard woman." I expressed my surprise at the adjective, for the girl herself was far from looking "hard." "Oh," he replied, "I do not mean that she is bad, at all, but she has gone through a good many revivals without ever manifesting any religious feeling." The evangelical point of view had changed the meaning of words. When we had returned home from Sunday-school (and the children had promptly taken off their shoes and stockings), the boys and I took a walk. In the course of it we came across a crowd from the Sunday-school at the creek, and some of the boys had just been in swimming. Before this Mr. Ishmael, when protesting against the neighborhood boycott on cheap negro labor, had maintained that the exclusion of the negro did not keep the white boys of the district from being as full of "devilment"

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as any in the black belt. My host, on the contrary, stood up for the boys of the district. About the worst thing they do," he said, “is riding to meeting and then going over the country firing pistols." The bantering at the swimming-hole convinced me that my host's view was the true one, and his boys confirmed it. These boys were thoroughly loyal to their church, and regularly paid “quarterage.” The exact sum I do not recall, but the preacher, I was told, with eight appointments on his circuit, got $400 a year—if he collected it. This last phrase could not help recalling the old story of the Vermont minister who declined an advance in his salary from four hundred dollars to five hundred, saying that it nearly killed him to collect the four hundred, and he was sure that another hundred would kill him. But these figures about salaries and

The size of a dollar

earnings did not evidence the poverty of the people so much as the magnitude of a dollar. Everything I saw impressed me with the utter folly of the statisticians who assume that the condition of labor has improved as much during the last century as wages are reported to have risen. A century ago nearly all our labor was rural; and rural wages and city wages are hardly comparable. Take, for example, this minister, with a money income as low as the poorest families on the East Side of New York. He lived, the farmer told me as we drove to town the next morning, in a respectable four-room house on the outskirts of Jonesboro'. He paid six dollars a month rent, and he received so much of his pay in corn and hay that he could keep a horse. He probably kept a garden which supplied his family with vegetables, and his wife almost certainly raised chickens enough to supply them fresh eggs the year round, and fried chicken during the long fried-chicken season. Even if he bought his vegetables, he bought them first hand from the farmers who raised them, instead of fourth or fifth hand, after shipper and railroad and wholesaler and retailer had all been paid. Similarly, he bought his wood of the man who chopped it, and paid $1.50 a cord, while I am charged $9 a cord for wood, and my coal costs me the equivalent of $4 a cord. Four hundred dollars in Jonesboro' to-day-as almost anywhere a century ago-means

Modern progress

more comfort than eight hundred dollars now means in our Eastern cities. My prosperous host, whose money in come was not much greater than that of the seventy-five-acre farmer to whom I have referred, offers a still better example of great comfort with a small money income. His expenses, except for taxes and for machinery, were almost nil. Not only did he raise all his own meat, but he also cured it. His apparatus was, of course, primitive, and the Hon. Carroll D. Wright could doubtless figure out that a stupendous saving of labor would be effected if the meat were packed by the improved machinery of a Chicago firm, and shipped to Arkansas by means of the marvelous economies of railroad transportation. But Farmer Dick son, by using the primitive machinery of his own smoke-house, saved all the cost of transportation and handling which the improved methods demand. Nor did this smoke-house stand alone in saving him the expenses due to our labor-making as well as labor-saving machinery. He showed me the old loom on which his wife still makes carpets, and brought out the quaint homespun blue-jeans frock coat, with short waist and long tails, which he had worn at his wedding. They now bought their cloth, as the economies of modern machinery had at last reduced a blue-jeans suit, wearing like iron, to $5, and it no longer paid to weave it at home. But carpets made in the East were not yet cheap and durable enough to throw the old hand-loom entirely out of use. Mr. Dick son also shod his own horses, his primitive and inexpensive forge saving him the trouble of taking the horses to town and the expense of hiring a blacksmith with town rents to pay. Everything, in fact, showed me that the economies due to modern methods of production used by city laborers are grossly exaggerated, both by the capitalistic writers who wish to show that all is going well without the need of reform, and by the socialistic writers who wish to show that the revolution is at hand when everybody can live in comfort with little work, by substituting the "advanced" methods of a colossal combination for the "primitive" methods of individual independence. This farmer, whose methods were, in the main, those used a century ago, was more prosperous

than our Eastern city workmen with double his money income. It is true that a few things cost him more. He paid from 15 to 20 cents a gallon for his oil, while the city workman gets it for 10 or 12. (Competition, he said, had once put it down to 5 cents a gallon, but monopoly had restored it.) His doctor's fee was fifty cents a mile, and if he brought a doctor from Jonesboro' it cost him $4 a visit. "It takes a mighty little while," he said, "to run up a doctor's bill of thirty dollars." The shoes for which he paid from $1 to $1.40 might perhaps be bought cheaper in a city department store. But all these were minor items compared with the food and fuel and house rent and yard rent which he had at so little cost, and which the city workman secures at such grinding expense. His work was entirely with his hands, and yet, in addition to providing for the current needs of his family, he each year cleared twenty acres of backwoods, and was able to give each son and daughter at marriage a good house on an eighty-acre farm.

The

mainstay

My host's prosperity, however, was not typical. He profited by an unearned increment. Except of the family the first plowing, all the work in the garden was done by his wife, and the half-acre garden, he said, furnished most of their living. His wife looked after the poultry, milked two cows, and made the butter. He laid it down as a rule that a farmer's wife ought to sell butter and eggs enough to pay for at least half of her clothing, and I believed his wife sold enough to pay for it all. Mrs. Dickson did not know what women's wages were, for she had never hired help, and did not know anybody who had. Yet, as if her hands were not full enough, when a poor neighbor had died leaving an orphan child, she had adopted her. The schoolmaster, as I have said, always boarded at her house, and when I laughingly remarked that the men-folks in her own family gave her almost enough to do, her reply was: "Oh! if I warn't occupied I'd be the miserablest creature living." To the city women who are seeking rest cures, I would recommend an Arkansas farm. It would at least be cheaper. My bill, from Saturday afternoon till Monday morning, including a drive back to Jonesboro', was one dollar,