By 1900 more than thirty-five per cent of all American farmers had become tenants, and the ratio was increasing rapidly. 9 Many farms technically listed as cultivated by their owners were so heavily mortgaged that the ostensible owner was hardly his own master. Some of these disappointments had been prophesied by supporters of the homestead principle in the event that no restraints on speculators were written into the law. 10 National Reformers in particular had demanded that homesteads granted to settlers should be made inalienable and that individual holdings of land should be limited by statute. But even these theorists could hardly have foreseen the extent to which the land laws would promote concentration of holdings.
Concentration is the law of the time.
Of the political tendency of our land policy, it is hardly necessary to speak. The failure of the homestead system has been analyzed frequently since George's day, but subsequent scholarship has done little more than add detail to the picture he drew. The agrarian utopia in the garden of the world was destroyed, or rather aborted, by the land speculator and the railroad monopolist. These were in turn but expressions of the larger forces at work in American society after the Civil War the machine, the devices of corporation finance, and the power of big business over Congress. The Homestead Act failed because it was incongruous with the Industrial Revolution.