Agricultural and Rural Population

§ 6. Sociological effects of agricultural decay.

Such changes hastened, no doubt, the decline in the birth-rate of the old American stock. The places of many of these long-settled families remained unfilled, as thousands of abandoned farm houses testified. The places of others were taken by a ten antry, white or black, lacking the thrift of ownership ; the lands of others passed to new owners, of alien races. The populations of many rural neighborhoods thus became het,ero 2 See Vol. I, p. 347.

geneous, with results calamitous to the social life. Once pros perous schools declined, once thronging country churches were deserted, and much of the old neighborhood democracy dis appeared. When, about the year 1900, prosperity began slowly to return to the American countrysides in the form of rising prices of farm produce, it was in large part too late to remedy the evil, except as it may be done by generations of effort under more favoring conditions. There are merely suggested here some of the complex sociological effects of past economic changes in American agriculture. It is certain that in the future, also, the economic changes in this field will be related closely to social and political changes of a fundamen tal character.

§ 7. Fewer, relatively, occupied in agriculture; use of machinery. Probably ever since the first census in 1790, the relative number of agriculturists in this country has been decreasing. Beginning in 1880, the numbers of those occu pied in agriculture for gain have been reported at the census in a form that makes them fairly comparable.'

The explanation of this decrease in the proportion of the population that is engaged in agriculture is twofold. The first is the real increase in the productive output per person in agricultural industry. In larger part this is due to the in creasing use of machinery in place of simple hand tools, and the substitution of horse-, hydraulic-, windmill-, steam-, and gasoline-power for human labor. This change has been made 3 It must be observed, in studying these figures, that farmers' wives and children, working at home, are not reported as gainfully occupied. But a widow or a spinster owner, if herself acting as the enterpriser, is reported as "occupied" in agriculture. The increasing number of such cases in the past generation in part explains the growing number and percentage of females in agriculture.

readily in the regions of level fields, but of late has been made possible to a greater extent in hilly country by rearrang ing and combining the old irregular fields into regular, fairly level rectangular fields easily tillable, while turning the rougher lands and hillsides into wood-lots and pastures' One man, thus, driving three or four horses or a tractor, can do the work formerly done by two or more men and do it just as Fig. 2, Chapter 28.—All farm crops.