INTRODUCTION. 11 



can go and prosper by growing up with the country. New 

 opportunities are likely to arise at any time and place; in 

 the city by the building of a new automobile factory or 

 something of the sort, and in the country by the discovery 

 of a new ore deposit or a new use for a supposed worthless 

 kind of tree, the invention of a machine for picking cotton 

 or otherwise expediting agricultural operations, or the de- 

 velopment of a more prolific strain of some staple crop. 



FITTING NEW SETTLERS TO THEIR ENVIRONMENT. 



The degree of success attained by a person who moves 

 to a new location depends mainly on his own efficiency and 

 his ability to adapt himself to the new conditions. Indus- 

 try and thrift will produce results almost anywhere, if the 

 environment is not too different from what one has been 

 accustomed to. A farmer who had been raising corn and 

 oats on the prairies of Illinois, or wheat on a thousand-acre 

 farm in North Dakota, where the value of crops in 1909-10 

 was only $8.80 per acre of improved land, would be likely to 

 feel very much out of place among the mountains of Choc- 

 taw County, or on a small sandy truck farm near Mobile, 

 where crops are worth $41 per acre; and one who had been 

 running a dairy in Wisconsin or among the rocky hills of 

 New Hampshire would be equally at a loss among the cot- 

 ton, corn and peanut fields of southeastern Alabama. 



As a rule a farmer or other person who moves from one 

 state or region to another looks for conditions -similar to 

 what he has been accustomed to,* and maintains about the 

 same standard of living as before ; it is therefore very desir- 

 able for one contemplating a change of location to know 

 beforehand something of the conditions of living in the re- 

 gion where he is going, especially as regards the soil, water 

 supply, climate and timber, the price of land, the average 

 size of farms and cost of buildings, the usual number per 

 farm of domestic animals of various kinds, the principal 

 crops and average yield of each, the prevailing religious 

 denominations, the proportion of settlers from his own state 

 or country, etc., etc. 



*This was noticed long ago by Sir Charles Lyell, an eminent 

 English geologist who traveled extensively through the South in the 

 second quarter of the last century. See especially his "Second Visit 

 to the United States" (1849), vol. 2, p. 89. 



