36 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



How great a revolution in the business of agriculture is yet 

 to be effected by the cultivation of land in large tracts, with the 

 full use of machinery and under the factory system, is matter 

 for the future to reveal; but it can not be doubted that the 

 shiftless, wasteful methods of agriculture, now in practice over 

 enormous areas of the earth's surface, are altogether too bar- 

 barous to be much longer tolerated ; and, as the result of such 

 progress, the return of the prices of meats and cereals to their 

 former higher rates, which many are anticipating on account of 

 the increasing number of the world's consumers, may be delayed 

 indefinitely. Possibly in the not very remote future, the world 

 — as its population shows no signs of abatement in its increase — 

 may be confronted with a full occupation of all farming land 

 and a great comparative diminution of product through an ex- 

 haustion of its elements of fertility ; but, before that time ar- 

 rives, improvements may possibly be made in agriculture which 

 will have practically the same effect as an increase in the 

 quantity of land ; or possibly chemistry may be able to produce 

 food by the direct combination of its inorganic elements. 



Finally, a comprehensive review of the economic changes of 

 the last quarter of a century, and a careful balancing of what 

 seems to have been good and what seems to have been evil in 

 respect to results, would seem to warrant the following conclu- 

 sions: That the immense material progress that these changes 

 have entailed has been for mankind in general, movement up- 

 ward, and not downward ; for the better and not for the worse ; 

 and that the epoch of time under consideration will hereafter 

 rank in history as one that has had no parallel, but which cor- 

 responds in importance with the periods that successively fol- 

 lowed the Crusades, the invention of gunpowder, the emancipa- 

 tion of thought through the Reformation, and the invention of 

 the steam-engine; when the whole plane of civilization and 



the animals themselves (I do not mean now on the wild-stock ranges, but even on the 

 trans-Missouri farms) have no roof over their heads, except the canopy of heaven, with 

 the mercury going occasionally twenty and even thirty degrees below zero. These waste- 

 ful methods in farming are in part promoted by the United States homestead law, and 

 the occupation of the hitherto inexhaustible expanse of cheap lands. When the igno- 

 rant, degraded, and impecunious can no longer acquire a hundred and sixty acres upon 

 which to employ their barbarous methods, and when the land already taken up shall 

 have risen from the low prices at which it now stands to fifty dollars or more per acre, a 

 new dispensation will arrive. Neither the cattle, nor the food which the cattle consume, 

 will then be raised by any such methods as now prevail ; neither will they be exposed to 

 the elements in winter. True enough, the opening up of other virgin fields in Australia, 

 South America, Africa, and elsewhere, may retard this rise in the value of the land in the 

 western part of our continent, and thus to a certain extent delay the passing of the land 

 exclusively into the hands of larger capitalists and better managers ; but it must be 

 considered that not all climates are suitable for energetic, capable farming populations, 

 and likewise that the best forage plants are restricted to temperate latitudes." 



