PRESENT CONDITIONS 15 



and growing richer ; food products are cheap and abundant ; 

 certain staples are produced in enormous quantities and sent 

 to feed the cities of the East and the industrial population 

 of Europe. The railroads transport these products nearly 

 one thousand miles for the same prices as they charge in the 

 East for transporting them one hundred miles. Wealth, 

 activity, and political power concentrate at the inlet and out- 

 let of the railway funnel, leaving vast areas of unused and un- 

 usable land between the terminals. Access to markets deter- 

 mines value. That is why the favored lands of Illinois, Iowa, 

 Kansas, Michigan, and Wisconsin, one to two thousand miles 

 from market, have risen in value to as high as three hundred 

 dollars per acre, and the lands of New England, New York, 

 and New Jersey go begging at twenty to sixty dollars per acre, 

 unless they lie within the artificial prosperity of the cities. 



Farther west in the irrigated regions of Colorado and Utah, 

 restricted areas are held for special fruit crops, at prices rang- 

 ing from three hundred to two thousand dollars and up, per 

 acre. But here, again, monopoly, now a monopoly of natu- 

 ral opportunity, is a factor in creating prices ; on this, how- 

 ever, the vast irrigation projects of the government, bringing 

 into use larger and larger areas of these favored lands, were 

 expected to exercise a check. Up to 1918 little has been 

 sold. Their reclamation cost too much. 



The willingness of the Southern planters to sell their lands, 

 and so to release them for intensive cultivation, has partly 

 turned the tide of immigration from the Eastern ports to 

 the South, and the market garden system is reaching increas- 

 ing areas. The development of factories to make cotton 

 fabrics and to utilize the formerly wasted cotton seed by turn- 

 ing it into meal for cattle and other animals, as well as into 

 the various food products, such as cotton-seed oil, cottolene, 



