tion in arriving at the optimum family-size of farm is that of the most profitable crops which can be grown in the community under consideration.

Under general diversified farming conditions in the United States, the optimum family-sized farm is from 200 to 250 acres in area. The American general farm of from 200 to 400 acres makes the largest labor income for the operator, affording him sufficient income for a desirable living and enabling him properly to raise and educate his children. After long investigation and research, Professor O. R. Johnson found that on the large Missouri farms in Johnson County a man handled over 75 acres of land, whereas on small farms he handled only 15 acres. The smaller farms yielded only a few hundred dollars in labor income, whereas the larger farms yielded over one thousand dollars in labor income. The relative overhead costs, such as costs of buildings and equipment, were always higher on the small farms. It has been observed in Denmark that the farmer with less than around 25 acres is radical.

Mr. Johnson found that it is better for a man to rent 200 acres when he has $5,000 capital than it is for him to own a small farm. To own land a farmer must first set aside $5,000 for equipment capital. If he has any additional money he may well make half payment on eighty acres in a community where he can rent additional land. As he accumulates more money he may make additional purchases until he owns the optimum-sized farm. Extensive surveys revealed the fact that the labor income of tenants was $500 and that of part owners on the same sized farms was $456, whereas the labor income of owners was only $314. It is evident from these findings, economically considered, that it is better to have tenantry on large farms than ownership on small farms. Figures reveal the fact that the owner farming his own land makes a higher rate of interest than owners renting their land for cash or shares. This is an unalterable check to tenantry.

The application of capital to land is found to be definitely fixed at an optimum amount from which diminishing returns set in, whether more or less is applied. From an investment

of $40 to $85 an acre in Missouri the labor income increased in amount, but a greater investment required allowance for so much interest that the total net labor income was reduced.

Education is found to be an important factor in the efficiency of the farmer. In the surveys one man in seven of low incomes had more than a rural school education, whereas one in three of the higher incomes had more than a rural school education.

A summary of the nature of farming shows that the familysized-farm of the maximum production per man is the most efficient and satisfactory means of production and that the nature of the product, education, land tenure and the amount of applied capital are factors in labor income. When the individual farmer has produced his crops he then has to bargain with the organized business world for their sale and for his purchases. Herein he is weak and nearly helpless because alone he cannot sell in large quantities. He cannot guarantee uniform quality. He has not the facilities for standardization, for economical large-scale handling, for advertising, for establishing trade connections, or reducing the unit cost of shipping and selling. He is ignorant of marketing and markets and has not the training or ability to bargain with the commercial world, nor has he the power and wealth to secure justice and fair treatment. Coöperation is the star to which the farmer must fix his hope for efficiency and success in distribution and purchasing. By organization in large societies the farmers can satisfy the consumers and get the largest share of the selling price of his goods, as well as buy his supplies on the closest margin. Farming lends itself to coöperation in buying and selling perhaps better than does industry, because the burden of marketing farm products is greatly increased by the smallness of the farm unit. Production is by a small entity, the farm; and consumption is by a small unit, the family. With a specialized world a very complicated and far-reaching marketing system is necessary. It is not the hope of coöperation to simplify to any great extent, if any, the marketing system, but it is hoped that coöperation may reduce the frictions and wastes and lessen the social burden entailed in unintelligent, sporadic, spasmodic, and dishonest handling of goods.

The present system does not adjust supply and demand,the marketing machinery is too clumsy. There is not enough centralization of direction for its complexity, and it is expensively run. The operators may be criticised for inefficiency, dishonesty and unfairness. But not knowing market requirements the farmers send products to the market centers that are unfit for sale or use unless they are worked over at great expense. Jobbers must continually strive to remedy the anarchy of spasmodic gluts and surplus. The whole distribution system works badly because it operates in disjointed parts instead of as a coördinating whole.

Thackeray's Romanticism

EMERSON GRANT SUTCLIFFE

University of Minnesota

With confidence one may look to Mr. James Branch Cabell to make two blades of romanticism grow where only one, or none at all, grew before. In the case of Thackeray, as elsewhere, he finds what he seeks. But his evidence, as he presents it on a few odd pages of Beyond Life, is strangely, and unnecessarily, superficial. Surer proof would be of a more subtle, more recondite, character than that Thackeray "avoids many a logical outcome of circumstance . . . . by killing off somebody and blinding the reader with a tear-drenched handkerchief;" or that he holds in reserve always the "unsuspected document" with which the god may step out of the machine and right matters at the end. So much one can accept as tokens that Thackeray, whether romanticist or not, was undoubtedly an imperfect technician. Less credible is Mr. Cabell's assertion that Thackeray's romanticism lies patent in the fact that a historical novel, Esmond, is his best work. For in Esmond, certainly, Thackeray has shown the body of the time its form and pressure so successfully that the effect is as realistic as in the novel of contemporary life. No one has ever felt that there were two Thackerays, one the realist of nineteenth century London, the other the historical romancer of the eighteenth century. For purely surface indications of his romanticism one might better cite his fairy story, The Rose and the Ring, or his chanting of bouillabaise and the mahogany

tree.

But his romanticism lies deeper than that. By Freudian slips he reveals himself. In his comments on fiction, as they appear explicit in criticism or implicit in parody, one detects, out of peradventure, that the avowed realist of Pendennis, The Newcomes, and Vanity Fair was in point of fact a romanticist, though frustrate. Honest-to-goodness, cross-my-heart-andhope-to-die romance-writing was impossible for him; his eyes looked at life and the arts of fiction-making too keenly. A fleering spirit of truth sat in his brain and refused to suppress its comment. But somehow his romanticism had to come out.

So it took vent in the sentiment and didacticism which so oddly color his satire. There is just one Thackeray, but he boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, and one-his heart of hearts-romantic.

I

The twinship discloses itself in his reminiscence of his early novel-reading and more so in his criticism of contemporary fiction, his own or others'. Throughout his life he enjoyed romances, especially those, paradoxically enough, which contain not too much love-making. He began what he called "the noble study of the novel" with Scotish Chiefs. Towards the end of his life he declared that the novels he liked best were those "without love or talking, or any of that sort of nonsense, but containing plenty of fighting, escaping, robbery, and rescuing." He read novels, like Stevenson, not for analysis of character or ethical significance, but, as Stevenson put it about his own tastes, "for some quality of the brute incident." During Thackeray's school-days Dumas "delighted and blinded him to all the rest of the world." To Scott, greatest of romancers, he also does reverence as "the friend whom we recall as the constant benefactor of our youth." "How well I remember," he exclaims, "the type and the brownish paper of the old duodecimo Tales of My Landlord! I have never dared to read The Pirate and The Bride of Lammermoor, or Kenilworth, from that day to this, because the finale is unhappy, and people die, and are buried at the end." Emerson, we recall, frequently re-read The Bride of Lammermoor for its moral purpose and its Aeschylean sense of Fate. Not so Thackeray. He exclaims rather over Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward, "Oh! for a half-holiday, and a quiet corner, and one of those books again." Nor was his romance-reading confined to the works of the masters. Mr. Irvin Cobb has lately exalted the dime novel of his youth over the mawkishness and unreality of McGuffey's Reader. Stevenson speaks eloquently of his joy in the garishness of Skelt's Juvenile Drama. And Thackeray asks: "Do I not recollect the nun's cell in The Monk, or in The Romance of the Forest? or, if not there, at any rate in a thousand noble romances, read in early days of halfholiday perhaps-romances at twopence a volume?"