The land owning farmers are now 35.2 per cent of the working rural population, the tenants are 15.1 per cent (occupying 30 per cent of all the farms), and the farm hands, farmer's children, etc., equal 49.7 per cent of the tillers of the soil.
With the working population on the farms constituting but 13 per cent of the total population, we have arrived at the point where but little more than 4 1-2 per cent of that total are land owning farmers, a little less than 2 per cent are tenants, and the remainder (6.46 per cent), are the children of farmers and wage hands. The price of farm land and the cost of farm equipment has advanced to such a figure that the farm wage worker, with an average wage of less than $35 per month (1918), has a remarkably slim chance to become a farmer on his own account and that chance growing slimmer.
The farm hand of today is no longer the potential equal of his employer, and all the old show of social equality is rapidly disappearing; only in the backwoods sections can it yet be found, and there the farm hand is usually the son of a neighboring farmer and therefore carries the status of his father. In the most developed regions the same relations prevail upon the farms as are found in the other industries, with the exception that the work is largely seasonal and therefore the employment is irregular and precarious. The farm hand has become a migratory laborer, possessing all the characteristics of his industrial brother, and faithfully reflecting the influences of so unstable an environment. Robbed of
