sources because of the commanding importance of this 

 industry and because of its relation to our future. 

 Nearly 36% of our people are engaged directly in agri- 

 culture. But all the rest depend upon it. In the last 

 analysis, commerce, manufactures, our home market, 

 every form of activity runs back to the bounty of the 

 earth by which every worker, skilled and unskilled, 

 must be fed and by which his wages are ultimately 

 paid. The farm products of the United States in 1906 

 were valued at $6,794,000,000 and in 1907 at $7,412,- 

 000,000. All of our vast domestic commerce, equal in 

 value to the foreign trade of all the nations combined, 

 is supported and paid for by the land. Of our farm 

 areas only one-half is improved. It does not produce 

 one-half of what it could be made to yield ; not by some 

 complex system of intensive culture, but merely by or- 

 dinary care and industry intelligently applied. It is 

 the capital upon which alone we can draw through all 

 the future, but the amount of the draft that will be 

 honored depends upon the care and intelligence given 

 to its cultivation. Were any statesman to show us how 

 to add $7,000,000,000 annually to our foreign trade, it 

 would be the sensation of the hour. The way to do this 

 in agriculture is open. Our share in the increase would 

 not be the percentage of profit allowed by successful 

 trading, but the entire capital sum. On the other side 

 stands the fact that the unappropriated area suited to 

 farm purposes is almost gone, and that we have been 

 for the last century reducing the producing power of 

 the country. Nowhere in the range of national pur- 



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