CAUSES OF TENANCY-TOWN AND COUNTRY

C. R. EDNEY, Mars Hill, N. C.

The Facts of Tenancy

There are in the United States today more than fifty-seven million people who do not own the land they cultivate or the houses they live in. They are tenants and renters in farm areas, factory villages, and town and city centers. Yet there are more than a half billion idle acres of productive land within the boundaries of the Nation. In North Carolina there are a few more than one million three hundred and forty thousand homeless, landless people and twenty-two million idle acres, thirteen million of which were once cultivated, but which are now turned out to wilderness growths. Once upon a time the National domain consisted of three billion acres that could be had for farm uses almost for the asking. And yet strange to say, more than half of the entire population of the United States are today landless and homeless.

Two questions in this connection are pertinent. situation mean? And what is the explanation?

The Causes

What does such a

It is not my purpose in this short discussion to point out all the evils that menace democratic institutions in a situation of this sort. Perhaps it is sufficient to say in a word that the security and the perpetuity of democracy depend upon stable communities, stable family groups, and stable, responsible citizenship; that the stability of communities, families, and citizens depends fundamentally upon farm and home ownership; that homeless, landless, people tend to be restless, roving, instable, irresponsible citizens. It is therefore obvious that democracy is in peril, when more than half of all the people of the state and the nation live in other people's houses and cultivate other people's land.

Civilization is rooted, and grounded in the home-owning, home-loving, home-defending instincts, says E. C. Branson.

"The homesteader," said Governor Bickett, "is the most conservative, and at the same time the most militant force in our civilization. The home-owner is a lover of peace, a pioneer in progress, but a very demon in battle when danger threatens the land he loves. The small farm owned by the man who tills it is the best plant bed in the world in which to grow a patriot. Such a condition brings wealth to the soil, and health to the souls of men. On such a farm it is possible to produce anything from two pecks of potatoes to a hill to a President of the United States. Every consideration of progress and safety urges us to employ all wise and just measures to get our lands into the hands of the many and to forestall that most destructive of all monopolies-the monopoly of the soil."

To anchor the farmer to his land and the villager to his home, to enable him to till the land under equal conditions and to hold that home in in

dependence, to save with his hands the just proportion of his labor, that he may sow in content and reap in justice-this is what we need, said Henry Grady.

It is now and has always been easier to acquire homes and farms in America than anywhere else on earth. What then is the explanation of the estate in life of the landless millions of North Carolina and the nation? Why, after more than two centuries of history, are there fiftyseven million landless people in the United States?

The fundamental causes are four. They lie (1) in heredity-mainly in the poverty, illiteracy, insanitary living, ill health, and hopelessness into which the tenant masses are born; (2) in personal deficiencies— mainly in a lack of the home-owning virtues, namely industry, thrift, sagacity, sobriety, and integrity; (3) in enveloping social-economic conditions that make it more and more difficult to buy and pay for farms and city homes, say under the crop-lien, time-price, supply-merchant system of farm tenancy areas, or the rack-rents that prevail in town and city centers, or the company ownership of mill village dwellings; and (4) in civic conditions-mainly in the laws of western civilization controlling private property ownership and the taxation of land values.

Any plan or scheme or law aimed at promoting home and farm ownership must take all these causes into consideration. I shall speak briefly of these causes as I have named them. They are all of them human-nature causes, individual and social; that is to say, they inhere in the very nature of human nature.

A primitive instinct of mankind is never to economize in anything that is abundant. For instance, water and daylight are seldom used with economy, or fruits in an abundant season, or money during periods of prosperity. In obedience to the same primitive instinct, lands and forests during the plentiful early days of the nation were held and used and wasted in wanton fashion. It is human nature not to save, not to economize anything that is plentiful. Most people accumulate most when times are bad. It has always been scarcity that has bred in people the practice of economy. Economic surveys prove conclusively that even in periods of scarcity, only about one person in every ten saves anything. The other nine consume all they produce and spend all they earn from day to day. The more primitive a people are the less they save. The Indians or Africans, for example, gorge at a buffalo or elephant feast, and starve for weeks thereafter. Consuming in reason and laying by supplies for future seasons is no part of the philosophy of children or childish individuals and races.

The beginnings of farm tenancy in the United States hark back to the days when rich lands in the west could be had for a small registration fee, and in the south for a few dollars an acre. Land was abundant and

cheap-too abundant and too cheap to challenge economy. The provident few secured it and held it; the improvident multitude carelessly threw away their chances at farm ownership, and bequeathed farm tenancy to the landless farmers of succeeding generations.

The Home-Owning Virtues

A second explanation of town and country tenancy lies in a common lack of the home-owning virtues. These are industry, thrift, sagacity, sobriety and integrity. Not one alone but all these are necessary to the firm possession of landed property. The lack of any one of them is fatal.

If a man lacks industry of the patient, persistent, steady gaited variety, he does not easily or often become a home or a farm owner. Sometimes through good fortune he inherits money or landed property, but it is sure to slip away from him unless he has the home-owning virtues. A tenant can never be anything but a tenant unless he possesses these virtues, or develops them.

Thrift is the combined effect of foresight and self-denial. It is the power to look ahead coupled with the power of self-control; the rainy-day sense in combination with the power to say no to oneself in the presence of immediate pleasures, for the sake of remoter, larger satisfactions. Manifestly the lack of thrift means the lack of property of any sort in any abundance.

Sagacity is what the farmer calls level-headedness, long-headedness, horse-sense, and the like. It is the power to reason things through to a safe conclusion; the power to pick up a chain of causes and consequences and to finger it through link by link, from end to end; to see the final, far away fact as vividly as most other men see the things that are present to the physical eye. It is the power that enables a man to look scrutinizingly into the future and to plan for its exigencies. Lacking sagacity a man lacks property in any large measure.

In like manner to be destitute of sobriety and integrity is to be headed toward the landless homeless estate of the vast multitude in this and every other country. The lack of these two qualities in a man's character places him at a disadvantage in the business world. It robs him of the credits and concessions that every man needs, that are always necessary and prerequisite in the securing of a home or a farm by a moneyless man. Nobody wants as a neighbor a man who is deficient in integrity and sobriety, and nobody will extend enough credit to such a man to pay for a home. Character is the first essential of credit. Credit is not only the ability, but the will to pay what is due exactly when it is due, and nobody can rely on the will or word of a man who lacks sobriety and integrity.

Hereditary Homelessness

Heredity goes a long way toward explaining John Smith, tenant. The average tenant is not only afflicted by one or more of the above mentioned personal causes, but he is usually a victim of the conditions bequeathed to him by his progenitors. In other words heredity is a factor in determining whether a man will be landless, homeless, poverty-stricken, unaspiring, and hopeless, or a sturdy, robust property-owning citizen.

In viewing the conditions transmitted by heredity, we discover that among the many things of personal inheritance that tend toward making

and perpetuating tenancy are, poverty, illiteracy and ignorance, bad health, feeblemindedness, low standards of living, and a pronounced lack of will power. The man who is the victim of one or more of these hereditary infirmities is well-nigh beyond human help. Even if given a home or a farm, he would not stand possessed of it sixty days, or six months, or six years. The reasonable thing, almost the only thing indeed, to do for the hereditarily submerged is to improve the conditions surrounding them and to arouse ambition and pride in self-help. Improving families who are homeless from hereditary causes is a sad and difficult task-a task to be patiently worked at through long years. They are so warped and weakened by the life they have lived that it is hard to extend any assistance that does not still further impoverish their wills to act in their own behalf. The conditions created by inheritance are not easily cured-and least of all by sentiment. It is a task that calls for the highest order of wisdom. People who are born into the squalid conditions of poverty, imbued from the cradle with primitive ideas of right and wrong, reared in foul surroundings, physical and moral, bred to suspicion and resentment or to servility and cunning, do not easily understand the social order or aspire to enter it. They naturally conclude that the world is made up of two fatally fixed classes, the one poverty-stricken and homeless and forever so doomed, the other the well-to-do whose way of life lies in keeping the poor in economic subjection. Such views of society by any class constitutes a seed bed of discontent, sedition, revolution, anarchy, bolshevism, I.W.W.ism. There is menace for democracy in the rising tides of landless and homeless men in America.

And it is just as bad for people to become habituated to pauper ideals, customs, habits, modes of living and thinking. It is a public calamity when large masses of people come to prefer poverty and tenancy to any other type and level of life. Even slaves after awhile learn to love their chain, said Rousseau. And already two and a half million farmers in America are becoming satisfied to be tenants-just that and nothing more. Many of them are firmly persuaded that it is poor sense and bad business to own a farm, that it is better sense and better business to rent. Many more of them are cursed with the restless foot of the Wandering Jew. "Me and Mary don't want to own no farm and no nothing much. We likes to move about," said a farm tenant in Chapel Hill during the flush times of the war period. When asked what he was going to do with his big roll of tobacco money, he replied, "Buy a Ford maybe, and ride around and have a good time." It is hard to do much with or for people of this sort. All told these are the folks whose descendants swell the pauper lists and lay heavy burdens on local, state and national treasuries. No single chapter of English history better lays bare the heart of England and her fundamental philosophy of life than the chapter on steadily increasing landlessness and pauperism among the peasant farmers, and the steadily rising poor rates to relieve the poverty of the masses. England has no greater problem today than the landless estate of her people. North Carolina and the nation are rapidly developing the same gigantic social problem.

Already we have vast multitudes in the South who are content to live in hutches and hovels, in poverty and dirt. And the conditions of life inside a house are rarely ever better than the walls and roof of it. These unambitious multitudes remain undisturbed because they herd with others of their own class and share ideas, ideals, and customs that are familiar and friendly. The most distressing thing about such a way of life is, that it is self-perpetuating in rapidly swelling ratios.

If the minds of such people are disturbed by longings they are fastened upon luxuries-not upon homes of their own filled with comforts and conveniences, but upon cheap chromos, tawdry articles of dress, victrolas, automobiles and the like. This childish love of vain display frequently infects the minds of home-owning farm families in remote lonely districts. The young people in such families are attracted to city lights as moths to candle flames. They disappear out of the country home and soon the old folks follow, and what the family had on the farm is soon lost in the waste of city ways-or so it is as a rule. When next the family moves, it follows the iron law of urban migration: it moves from a smaller into a larger city; and the larger the city the more densely massed the population is in the tenement districts, and the more hopeless the social conditions. Not even the rich can any longer afford to live in homes of their own in the largest cities of America. Instead they live in rented apartments and family hotels for the most part. Eighty-nine per cent of all the people of greater New York, for instance, live today in tenements, apartment houses, and hotels. The New York people who live in their own houses are only eleven in the hundred of population.

Social-Economic Causes

The social-economic causes of tenancy are primarily those that grow out of industrial-urbanism. Modern industrialism means the big-scale production of economic goods by labor-saving, profit-producing devices in factory systems. During the last hundred years America has moved up from agricultural levels to industrial-commercial levels under city conditions. So it is in the great industrial area east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio and Potomac rivers; and so it is in the great industrial area of North Carolina. The movement is out of domestic production with hand tools owned by the workers, into factory production with machines owned by the corporation. It is a way of life that not only strips workmen of their tools but also of houses of their own and even of the desire for home ownership. It masses them in company-owned houses in mill villages or in city centers. And the larger the city, the fewer are the people who live in homes of their own. The more populous and prosperous an area becomes the more the tenants and the fewer the owners, and this apparently fatal law of life is just as evident in rich farm areas as in rich cities. The rent of factory dwellings is always small, ranging from fifty cents to a dollar or so a room per month in the south, and sometimes the houses are occupied rent free. Naturally the factory-owned village is the most practical plan for factory owners, and the most convenient plan for