152 THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



d. If intensive cultivation is preferable as a means of obtaining 1 

 the largest possible returns on the capital invested, it follows that the 

 dwellings of the farmers must be closer together, thereby opening 

 social possibilities now denied to them as a class, and enabling culti- 

 vators to act in combination for any public or social purpose. This 

 proposition that intensive cultivation enables farmers to live in a bet- 

 ter social environment is a corollary from the third proposition. For 

 with twenty-seven-acre farms 60 to 80 farmers could concentrate their 

 homes in one locality. This concentration of homes would bring social 

 life with both its pleasures and obligations, to each farmer's door. 



Third, irrigation through the creation of business opportunity 

 furnishes a remedy for our industrial ills. 



a. By furnishing a new outlet for human energy and thus reliev- 

 ing the congestion of our cities. In 1850 only a little over one-eighth 

 of the population of the United States was in cities of 8,000 or more, 

 but so rapid has been the drift of population from the country to the 

 town that nearly one- third of our entire population is now to be found 

 in cities. It is interesting to note how in a single century, from 1790 

 to 1890, the country has lost in percentage of population while the city 

 has gained. In 1790 the urban population was only 3.35 per cent, of 

 the whole, while the per cent, of the rural population was 96.65. In 

 1820 the urban population was 4.93 per cent., and the rural, 95.07 per 

 cent. In 1850, 12.49 per cent, of the populaiion was to be found in 

 villages and cities and 87.51 per cent in the country districts. In 1870, 

 20.93 per cent of the population was to be found in the cities and 79.07 

 per cent in the country. In 1890, 29.12 per cent of the population was 

 to be found in the cities and only 70.88 per cent in the country. 



Not only has the current of population set steadily in the direc- 

 tion of cities, but manufacturing industries have expanded and agri- 

 culture has declined. Human genius is already demanding a new field 

 for employment, because the conditions of prosperous activity in all 

 settled countries have been outgrown. Our cities have become the 

 congested slum centers of idle and hungry tenants. They are neither 

 producers in the real sense of the term, nor are they any longer equit- 

 able distributors of production. Capital can wait for an adjustment 

 of our economic conditions, but labor cannot. Idleness is danger. 

 Manifestly, the best remedy for the laborless is an opportunity to 

 labor; for the homeless, a chance to earn a home. Forty millions sur- 

 plus irrigable acres west of the Mississippi await the surplus of the 

 85 per cent of our population crowded east of the Mississippi. 



But, granting that the simple system of putting surplus labor on 

 surplus land will minimize the evil of congestion, it may be asked: (1) 

 How are the unemployed to be transported to the place where labor 

 awaits them? (2) How are they to be supported after they get there? 

 (8) Having completed their labors on the canal and taken up a small 



