doubtless took the farm hand of that period as a matter of course. But he was a highly specialized development; probably nothing like him ever existed before and may never exist again."

Carver announced the decline as an historical fact, in the past tense. Yet the end had not arrived, although the decline has continued and what remains is the vestige.

A series of studies have quietly charted this contemporary phase of the fading career of the hired man. In 1919, W. J. Spillman found that one-third of some 2,000 Middle Western farm owners had passed through a stage of work as hired laborers. Of this number, 45 percent had acquired ownership by marriage or inheritance, only 5 percent by homesteading, and the balance by purchase. This study reflected opportunity as it had existed in an earlier period.

Farther to the East and 7 years later, James Hypes found among 144 Connecticut farmers that only 18 percent had been hired laborers at some time. In 1937, John D. Black of Harvard University found that the agricultural ladder still functioned for tenants, but that laborers "were piling up at the foot."

Three years later, H. C. M. Case of the University of Illinois, wrote that in earlier decades, "The settling of new areas, especially in the

Dakotas, Minnesota, and Canada, made it possible for many tenants with small savings to become farm owners through the purchase of lowpriced land or the homesteading of new land. Farmers leaving the old established farm areas like the Corn Belt gave many young men in these areas an opportunity to become farm tenants and to take over farms

which were vacated by tenants moving into new areas. At the present time, however, the agricultural area of the United States has ceased to expand. Now the competition is for farms which are already established."

Inheritance

Increasingly scholars recognize that inheritance has become a surer means of ascending the agricultural ladder than working on the farm for wages.

"For most farm laborers who wish to rise to the status of independent farmers, the opportunity should ordinarily come through inheritance or intervening occupations off the farm rather than by a farm ladder," said Joseph S. Davis of Stanford University in 1937

"The sons of farmers,” adds an Illinois Experiment Station Bulletin of 1940, "are finding, as they approach maturity, less opportunity of becoming established as farmers themselves. There are not so many farms for rent; and the opportunity to get a start by working as a hired laborer has been reduced." To close the gap in the ladder for those with prospects of inheritance, colleges of agriculture began to devise special terms for father-and-son farm operating agreements.

Backwaters

The backwaters of agricultural depression from the 1920's and of industrial depression of the 1930's were becoming visible plainly over the land.

In the Upper Mississippi Valley which was his citadel, the evidence grows ever clearer that the farm laborer is becoming less and less the

hired man of American tradition. It accumulates in little ways. Early marriage, Henry C. Taylor pointed out in his Agricultural Economics, was an obstacle to the hired man's ascent of the ladder; and intimacy with the farmer's family and work side by side with the farmer were guarantees of social equality and protection against exploitation.

Symbolic of a shift in these respects taking place in the Corn Belt is this 1937 report in Agricultural Digest: "Recent help-wanted advertisements for farm hands have in many cases stipulated married men, with trailer houses. In former years Iowa farmers hired unmarried men, boarding them in their own homes, or employed married helpers, providing them with separate houses." A 1938 release of the Illinois Emergency Relief Commission stated that in St. Claire County, "farm operators have in large measure discontinued giving foodstuffs and shelter, in addition to wages, regarding their workers more as employees in other industries. This circumstance may contribute to another phase of the problem, since it tends to result in the use of casual and transient labor, especially in seasons of greatest need."

From late colonial and early national days, it was common practice to engage hired men by the year or month. In 1941, reports Iowa State College, only about one-sixth of Iowa's farmers employed men by the year, each employing but one.

Another one-fifth of the farmers employed men by the month, but these received on the average only four months of work.

Farmers' wives lend their influence to the side of change. "You can remember this," declared an Illinois farmer's wife in 1940, "The women

won't do any more cooking for hired men. I never have a man in the house. For the last 6 weeks [during harvest] they've been feeding them in the church on big long tables, at 40 cents a meal. Otherwise they eat in restaurants. Our men bring their dinners. Let their own wives put up their dinners. Farm women aren't going to be tied down. They aren't going to be slaves. Farm women want modern homes."

She was willing, as part of the price of her freedom, to drive farm machinery and to have her 12-yearold daughter do so.

Voiceless

In the Upper Mississippi, and in other farm areas where not more than one or two men are employed by a farmer, the term hired man survives in common usage, and many outward aspects of the hired man relationship remain.

Change comes piecemeal, irregularly, subtly, and unobserved in the communities in which it occurs. For one thing, as an Illinois newspaper recently remarked, the hired laborer "is a voiceless fellow." For another, the effects of contemporary changes on farmers attract much more attention than those that affect laborers. But the observer can see straws in a wind that leaves many of the familiar forms of the hired man, and the name, but dries out the sub

stance.

Today the need for extraordinary measures to provide agricultural laborers seems to arise principally from areas where the hired man never has occupied any substantial place. In peace, it has often been the same. Sixty years ago the presi

farm and nonfarm production, between farm and nonfarm income, and between commercial and noncommercial farming. It masks other things. There is the small item, for example, of a certain inverse relationship that often exists between individual security and social security. Every man under his own vine and fig tree is an age-old dream; but chasing it too ardently may leave a country without enough factories and weapons. Hidden in the deceptive query "How Many Farmers Should We have?" is the problem of isolation versus world trade, with its bearing on specialization or diversity in agriculture and therefore on the size of the farm personnel.

Numbers Quiz

It would be difficult, in fact, to name any farm problem with a bigger content. When we know how many farmers we need, we shall know more about other important national matters. Our answer will touch many aspects of security-our role, both political and economic, in world affairs; our policy with regard to unemployment; the composition of the farm output; the balance we should desire between the use of machinery and the use of manpower in agriculture; and the extent to which agriculture should have a core of selfsufficiency in the heart of its commercialism. Some of these questions we may have to tackle piecemeal, apart from the basic question how many farmers we ought to have. Yet we should not neglect the fundamental issue. Even partial light on it, sufficient only to reveal the outlines, may save us difficulties, especially the sort involved in rural-urban controversies over tariffs, price sup

ports, crop adjustments, and land policy. Strangely enough, we may find it practical to ask not only how many people should be in agriculture, but why they should be there.

Everyone agrees that people should be in agriculture to produce foods and fibers; but that is too general. Agreement comes harder when we particularize. Farm and nonfarm disputants have argued for years over the question whether agriculture is a business or a way of life— whether, in other words, people should be in it to feed the market or feed their souls. They have differed likewise as to whether the purpose of farming is farm or national welfare; as to whether farmers should grow, behind tariff walls, what could be more cheaply imported; and as to whether people should be in agriculture in excess of the commercial need. These are forms of the broader question why people should be in agriculture at all. They demand practical answers. One form is sleeping now but will wake when peacetime reconstruction begins. Our country is industrial as well as agricultural, and wants an export market for factory goods as well as farm stuff. Broadly, it can export factory goods only if it imports something else, and the implications for the farmers' market and consequently for agriculture's personnel are serious. We don't specifically know why people should be in agriculture, or how their function bears upon security.

But let us stick to our numbers quiz, though with small hope of getting a numerical answer. How many farmers we require, the concrete form of the general question why people should farm, is a problem in security both individual and social.

Individual security may quarrel with social security if wrongly sought. Let us ask first, therefore, how we could give the greatest individual security to the largest number of farmers if we had not to worry about social or collective security. We could do it, as Oris Wells pointed out in the September 1940 issue of this review, by turning the clock back, letting farm efficiency decline, and establishing possibly 45,000,000 people on small, technically primitive, and relatively noncommercial farms. This would add some 13,000,000 to the present farm population. It would be a vine-and-fig tree plan, with income sacrificed to selfsufficiency and aloofness from the money-system, and with specializa

tion rare.

Moving that way would lessen agriculture's dependence on the rest of the economy. It would hark back to an earlier period, when most farms were part-time or subsistence farms, agriculture was unspecialized, and the growth of our cities had hardly begun. Farmers would have to relearn forgotten skills; they would have to make clothing, furniture, farm tools, and farm buildings as well as crops. Money to buy such things they simply would not have, or not in the amounts to which they have become accustomed. They would have to pay high for their increased security.

Collective Too

Among the items would be isolation, loss of efficiency, harder work, sacrifice of comfort and convenience, and cultural stagnation. Farmers would be more dependent on nature's whims. Stability on a low level they would have; and many farmers might consider it not too

dearly bought. Low-producing farms without mortgages so to speak can be attractive in terms of security if not in terms of income.

But security is collective or social as well as individual. It requires defenses. Trying to promote it on a purely individual basis, through heavy manning of the land, is dangerous and self-defeating. Overcrowded farms have small power to feed the cities and to sustain industry. They have small military value. The AAA programs and the 1934 drought were factors; but another factor was an increase in the number of persons engaged in agriculture with no corresponding increase in their land resources. It is lucky the trend did not continue. Overcrowded farms mean relatively unproductive farms, small surpluses for the market, and military weakness. Extreme examples of over-ruralization, such as India and China, are examples also of appalling insecurity.

This country need not prefer social to individual security as drastically as Great Britain has done; the compulsion is far less urgent. But it should ponder the British case. After the repeal of the Corn Laws in the Hungry Forties, the British government left agriculture to shift for itself. As a result, the cultivated area ceased to expand and the country became heavily dependent on food imports. This was tough on British farmers and farm workers; they still complain. But it had an offset in vast industrial development combined with world trade and world power, which amounted to social securityspecifically, readiness for the German menace. Agrarians deplored the giant growth of industry; they demanded more farms, more farm people, and high or higher tariffs on