234 BOAED OF AGRICULTUEE. 



This subject of area, can we comprehend it? A difficult 

 task, but let us endeavor to. At the first glance we see a 

 vast country, stretching from the North where the snow never 

 melts, to the far South where it never falls ; its area, includ- 

 ing Alaska, almost equalling the whole of Europe, with its 

 twenty-two different nationalities. It is eighteen times 

 larger than Spain ; forty-one times larger than Great Britain 

 and Ireland. Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, 

 Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Scandinavia and Greece 

 could be placed within its limits once, twice, thrice. This 

 is simply the size of Uncle Sam's farm. 



To give some idea of the capabilities of this vast farm, I 

 quote Dr. Josiah Strong's figures as found in his volume, 

 "Our Country." "The crops of 1879, after feeding our 

 50,000,000 of inhabitants, furnished more than 283,000,000 

 bushels of grain for export. The corn, wheat, oats, barley, 

 rye, buckwheat and potatoes, — that is, the food crops, — 

 were that year produced on 105,097,750 acres, or 164,215 

 square miles. But this is less than one-ninth of the smallest 

 estimate of our arable lands. If, therefore, it were all brought 

 under the plough, it would feed 450,000,000 and afford 

 2,554,000,000 bushels of grain for export." But this is not 

 all. So excellent an authority as Mr. Edward Atkinson 

 says, that where we now support 50,000,000 people, "one 

 hundred millions could be sustained without increasing the 

 area of a single farm or adding one to their number, by 

 merely bringing our product up to our average standard of 

 reasonably good agriculture; and then there might remain 

 for export twice the quantity we now send abroad to feed 

 the hungry in foreign lands." If this be true (and it will 

 hardly be questioned by any one widely acquainted with our 

 wasteful American farming), 1,500,000 square miles of cul- 

 tivated land, less than one-half of our entire area this side of 

 Alaska, are capable of feeding a population of 900,000,000, 

 and of producing an excess of 5,100,000,000 bushels of 

 grain for exportation ; or, if the crops were all consumed at 

 home, it would feed a population one-eighth larger, viz., 

 1,012,000,000. This corresponds very nearly with results 

 obtained by an entirely different process from data afforded 



