578 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Again, although the cotton States of the Atlantic coast will not be 

 great producers of grain, especially of wheat, yet in the Southwest — 

 in Texas, Oklahoma, the Indian Territory and Louisiana — we could 

 readily produce the entire wheat crop of the United States upon un- 

 occupied land, whenever labor and capital can be found sufficient to 

 develop the product. As our country people say, a dollar a bushel would 

 fetch it. Some of the best hard or macaroni wheat in the world is 

 already produced in this section. 



I have called the attention of economists to the basis of this 

 development of agriculture, namely, what may be called the free 

 land tenure established in the United States. An outsider should 

 deal with the conditions of other countries with great caution, 

 but in the study which I have given to the subject it has seemed to me 

 very plain that the feudal land system of the United Kingdom of Great 

 Britain and Ireland had come to its necessary end, witnessed by the 

 present movement for the practical confiscation of land titles in Ireland. 

 One may ask, what would be the potential of the land of the United 

 Kingdom in the production of food for its own population, if the pur- 

 chase and sale of land were as free as it is in the United States ? 



Again, it appears to an outsider as if the revulsion from the feudal 

 system in France and large parts of Germany, where the land is cut up 

 in little patches, had also failed in developing the potential of the soil, 

 the application of modern mechanism to its full effect being rendered 

 impossible by the great subdivision of the soil. 



You will remark that the area of the United States, omitting Alaska, 

 covers three million (3,000,000) square miles; the habitable part of 

 Canada may be computed at over two million (2,000,000), to which we 

 may add Mexico, giving in all, say over five million (5,000,000) square 

 miles, of which more than one-half is available for cultivation. At 

 nine thousand (9,000) to ten thousand (10,000) bushels to a square 

 mile, which is rather a low standard of intelligent cultivation, ten (10) 

 per cent, of this area, or two hundred and fifty thousand (250,000) 

 square miles, would yield about the present wheat crop of the world. I 

 think we could spare that area without missing it, even within the 

 limits of the United States, if we could make a contract for a term of 

 years at thirty- two (32) shillings a quarter in London for all the 

 wheat Europe could possibly buy. 



Even if this forecast be considered visionary, it may be surely held 

 that the United States can supply for many years to come the 

 entire deficiency in the wheat crop of the United Kingdom, twenty-five 

 million (25,000,000) to thirty million (30,000,000) quarters a year, 

 probably by improvement in intensive farming, without adding ma- 

 terially to the land which may be devoted to the wheat crop. 



In this paper I have given the details of the grain problem. Cotton 



