THAT VITAL THING, DEBT
Mrs. Peattie Discourses on It in Connection With Mortgage Statistics.
What the Figures Tell of the Movements and Emotions of the People-The Sowing of 1887 in Nebraska.
It is a difficult thing to make the mortgaged indebtedness of a country intersting or simple reading. Yet there is no subject which more nearly concerns the happiness of men and women than this. For in proportion as men enjoy the fruits of their labors, are they free men. No man is free who must give the results of his toil to another man.
If this fact had always been fully appreciated by Americans, they would not perhaps have reached a point where the present financial depression became an inevitable thing. If they, had been more patient in earning and less eager to borrow , if they had developed resources, instead of speculating in possibilities, they would not now, so many of them find themselves hemmed in by a wall of debt. For men build barriers of debt so high that never while life lasts, can they surmount them. And they are too often prone to aquire these debts recklessly in the hope opf large success, and then, when they fail to meet the drain they have put upon themselves, to find fault with the system which permitted them to commit such an error. On the other hand, there are circumstances which compel a man to become a borrower, And these conditions arise, primarily from the system of land and money which obtains here. But not to go into questions so large, and concerning which there are so many differences of opinion, It may be interesting to those who are themselves struggling under the burden which borrowed money imposed to know something of the condition of the people, in this respect, all over our beautiful but much suffering country.
Among the extra census bulletins are some which deal with the statistics of farms, homes and mortgages, and which represent a new departure on the part of our government. Mr. Robert P. Porter, chief of the census bureau says: "It is, I believe , the first time a government has ever attempted to invade for startical purposes the realm of private indebtedness."
He gives some idea of the labor involved in this extraordinary investigation in the following sentence: "The employment of a small army of 2,50 special agents and clerks to make an abstract of every mortgage placed on record in every county of the United States for the last ten years has attracted attention to the dangers of these incumbrances, to the alarming extent to which usury is practiced, and to the defectiveness of these records in all parts of the country. The agents of the census office have, as a matter of fact, overhauled the records in every state and territory. They have traveled on horseback and on foot through the most sparsely settled districts of our vast domain in search of mortgages, and have done their work so industriously and so thoroughly that we now have on file in Washington, as a result of their labor, the abstracts of about 9,000.000 mortgages"
It would be impossible in the space of such an article as this to deal with all of the states of the union. Therefore it may be best simply to use Mr. Porter's figure as they refer to states which topographically, or naturally, or in products, or manner of people, greatly contrast with one another.
In a letter accompanying his report to the secretary of the interior Mr. Porter says concerning this state:
"The real estate mortgage business of Nebraska during the ten years 1880-1890 is represented by 837,872 mortgages made to secure a debt of $274,808.858.
Of this debt 48.44 per cent remained unpaid January 1, 1890. Nearly one-third (81.90 per cent
