77© POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



our domestic traffic over a greater area and among a much larger 

 number of people than have elsewhere secured their own liberty has 

 been so much more potent in its progressive influence as to have less- 

 ened the evils of the restrictions on foreign trade. 



According to my observation, all the efforts to regulate railroad 

 charges by State legislation and under the interstate commerce act 

 have greatly retarded the progress of the railway, and have deprived 

 great States, notably Texas, of any service at all commensurate to the 

 demand which might otherwise have been supplied to the mutual 

 benefit of the owners of the railways and the inhabitants of the State. 

 The most serious retarding influence, especially evil in its effect upon 

 farmers, was the useless panic of 1893, caused by the silver craze — 

 that is to say, by the effort to enact a force bill by which the pro- 

 ducers of our great crops would have been compelled to accept money 

 of half the purchasing power of that to which their industry had been 

 long adjusted. This caused a temporary paralysis of industry, in 

 which I think none suffered so much as the farmers of the country. 



But admitting these temporary variations, I find the same rule 

 governing the products of the farm that governs the mine, the factory, 

 and the workshop — namely, a lessening of the number occupied in 

 ratio to the product; a great reduction in the cost of labor; an in- 

 creased return in due proportion of the skill and intelligence of the 

 farmer; a rapid reduction in the farm mortgages, ending at the pres- 

 ent date in making the farmers of the grain-growing States the cred- 

 itors of the world, especially those occupied upon wheat. 



But in the development of this progress we find the reverse of 

 the practice in the factory and the workshop. The most important 

 applications of science and invention led first to what might be called 

 the manufacture of wheat on an extensive method of making a single 

 crop on great areas of land. That phase has about spent its force; the 

 great farms are in process of division ; the single-crop system has about 

 ended; the intensive system of making a larger product from a less- 

 ened area with alternation and variation in crops is rapidly taking the 

 place of former methods. 



Therefore, while many branches of manufacturing tend more and 

 more to the collective method, the tendency in agriculture is more 

 and more to individualism in dealing with the land itself, coupled 

 with collective ownership in the more expensive farm machinery, in 

 creameries, cheese factories, and the like. We are apparently at a 

 halfway stage in this revolution of agriculture. The intelligent and 

 intensive methods of breeding cattle and sheep is also rapidly taking 

 the place of the semibarbarous conditions of the ranch. 



If these points are well taken, the very suggestion that we must 

 compute the land which should be under the plow in 1890 in order to 



