health, under the misguided, unreasoning delusion that purgation, even when unneeded, is good for them. These mothers do not know, because they have never been instructed, that unnecessary purgation merely perverts elimination and makes for ill health.

Just as the school affords us our only opportunity to impart uniform knowledge regarding the preservation of health, so it affords us our greatest opportunity for the discovery of unrecog nized disease. The medical inspection of school children in the present state of widespread ignorance regarding health must be considered of the greatest value to the race. It is obviously a strange philosophy whereby we utilize for the recognition of disease the very institution in which we neglect to impart knowledge regarding the preservation of health; but it is surely much better to recognize disease even though our education be deficient than to neglect both. Later, when we have revised our educational system and have begun to impart to all the knowledge that is now reserved for the few, the necessity of school inspection will be greatly minimized, for many of the defects of children will be recognized by their parents and corrected long before the child is sent to school.

As for school inspection, valuable as it is, its importance to society is altogether too little realized. What little has been done has hardly scratched the surface of its possible service to the race. A very few States now make provision for State-wide school inspections, and in New York City there is as admirable a system as is employed anywhere. Yet none of these systems is without defects, while in many large cities and in almost all rural districts there is no provision at all for the medical examination of school children.

But of even greater importance than school inspection is the recognition of the need of treatment when pathological conditions have once been recognized. It is well enough for the school physician to know that abnormal conditions exist, but it is of more importance for the child's parents to realize the imperative necessity of having morbid conditions rectified as soon as they are discovered. Many are the pathetic cases the school physician meets that could easily be remedied by just a little knowledge

on the part of parents-merely knowledge that it should be the right of everyone to have thoroughly taught to him. Adenoids, leading to chronic nervousness, deafness, and retarded mental development, that have been considered "just catarrh "; organic heart disease, resulting from neglected rheumatism that some one has called "growing pains "; chorea that is attributed to the child's being "fidgety "; tuberculosis that progresses untreated for months, because the child is always "catching cold." Every physician knows that examples of such sad results of ignorance could be recounted without end, and that the ignorance is found among those in the highest places as well as among those in the lowest.

It is easy to dwell at length upon the enormous evils for which we are responsible by our neglect of education along the lines of hygiene and health, and it is difficult not to dwell upon the terrible price we are paying for our ignorance. Enough has been indicated, it would seem, to remove all doubt that all that is being done for the physical welfare of the child will not compensate for what is being left undone. All the propagandic movements to instruct the people with regard to public health, all the educational efforts of boards of health, all the campaigns of enlightenment that the ablest journalism can initiate, are worth almost nothing when compared with the results that might be obtained by the adequate instruction of the young in school. With regard to the body as well as the intellect, knowledge implanted upon the plastic mind of youth, the lasting impressions and prejudices formed in early life, are the certain, unfailing means of insuring an education that will be of enduring benefit to the race.

THE AMERICAN FARM LANDLORD-TENANT

PROBLEM

PHILIP R. KELLAR

T may seem to many to be a far cry from the farm tenure problem of Great Britain to the farm tenure problem of the United States. Americans as a rule will look upon Chancellor David Lloyd George's campaign " to free British land from landlordism and get the people back on it," because the land holding system there is a ghastly failure," as a campaign of exclusive interest to Britons, and as having little if any bearing upon the course of affairs in the United States. Indeed, so far apart seem the two countries in this respect that the average American would be quick to brand as a sensational pessimist the one who would attempt to point out any dangerous parallelism.

As a matter of fact there is no parallel at present, but the conditions in Britain suggest what the conditions in America may be in the course of not so many years if present tendencies are permitted to go on unchecked or undiverted. British conditions, European conditions, may be made to serve as useful illustrations of what America may expect and should plan to avoid.

That the time is come for earnest consideration of these illustrations is amply proved by the trend from farm owner to farm tenant in the United States, which is accompanying the trend from farm to city, and is clearly indicated by the figures of the last census. In ten years the number of American tenant farmers increased by 329,712, or 16.2 per cent., while the number of farmers operating land owned by them increased by only 295,399, or 8.1 per cent.

Although the number of owner-operators still largely exceeds the tenant farmers, such a relative rate of increase as has prevailed for the last ten years will show a reversal of this condition before many years. Even to-day there are nearly two and a half million (2,354,676 in 1910) farmers in America who rent the lands they cultivate, as compared with four million (3,948,722 in 1910) farmers who own their farms. Should the relative rate of increase continue for another ten years the actual increase in

number of tenant farmers would be nearly 50,000 greater than of farmer-owners.

With two and a half million tenant farmers America already has a bigger problem, in point of numbers, than has Great Britain. The problem is not so serious yet, largely because of the area of the United States and the newness of our agricultural development, but it is serious enough to command earnest attention. The unsolved farm land tenure problem in the United States is largely responsible for the annual migration into western Canada of tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of good American farmer citizens. In fact so serious has the problem become already that at least one great Canadian transcontinental railway, the Canadian Pacific Railroad, has made it the basis for a systematic campaign to induce American farmers to settle in Canada. This railroad, recognizing the fact that good tenant farmers are finding it increasingly difficult to purchase farms in the United States, has set aside a vast sum to help these men secure homes in the Canadian West, selling them the land at a low price, upon a twenty-year payment plan, and loaning them $2,000 cash for immediate improvements upon the same long time for repayment. While the railroad does not bar farm owners from participation in this plan, it was inaugurated and is operated primarily for the benefit of tenant farmers who have been successful, but are unable to purchase farms in the location where they are farming.

Recently I had a very vivid illustration of the power of this proposition to attract good American farmers to Canada, when I joined a special trainload of home-seekers drawn from half a dozen American States, bound from Chicago to Calgary. Most of the 200 men aboard the train were farmers, and more than half were tenant farmers. Several of the latter were comparatively young men, with families, who had lived upon the same farm for a number of years, paying half the profits to the landlords. All of these men said that the more successful they were, the more profit they made the farms yield, the greater became the share which the owner received, and the higher he placed the value of his land, and the farther out of reach of the tenant's purchasing power the land went. One man from central Ohio

had been making for the landlord as much as $9 per acre per year on a 170-acre farm, and the result was that the owner valued the land upon the basis of $9 annual income, which is a little more than five per cent. on $175. Another man from Iowa was renting on shares and paying the landlord $10 per acre per year. These men admitted the land was worth $175 to $200 per acre, but all of them frankly admitted their fear of buying the farms and attempting to pay for them out of the land itself. The burden loomed up too vast, and the period of time the mortgage must run was so long they were doubtful of their ability to stand up under the strain. And these were good farmers, up-to-date, hard-working, ambitious, and not moral or physical cowards. One was an American for a number of generations, of Dutch stock; the other was an English emigrant who had lived in Iowa for nearly twenty years.

George Ade is doubtless more widely known as a successful author of humorous stories and plays, but he is a big owner of Indiana farm land, and he lives on one of the farms, and calls himself a farmer. He is in the habit of keeping his eyes and ears open, and drawing rather accurate conclusions from what he sees and hears. In a recent article in The Country Gentleman Mr. Ade wrote:

"Land at $200 an acre will change us, all at once, from a new and shifting community to an old and settled community. Those who have are going to hold. Transfers of land are becoming infrequent. The tenant farmer on 160 acres hasn't the courage to assume a debt of $32,000 and pay $1,600 interest on the mortgage when he can get the farm for about $1,300 a year in grain rent. Twenty years ago the young farmer with a new wife and a span of horses could buy good land on credit for $50 an acre, the mortgage drawing seven or possibly eight per cent. With two or three crops to boost him along he could count on reducing the principal so the interest would not devour him. Those who bought at $50 an acre and used ordinary diligence in farming paid out long ago and now are independent landed proprietors. The young farmer of to-day who has a few hundred dollars and a team of horses is distinctly up against it if he wants to get a farm of his own. The same land that was freely