pacified and the fertility and accessibility of those 

 prairie lands became better known the settlers poured 

 into them in ever increasing numbers. In a very 

 IV\v years, approximately between the years of 1860 

 and 1880 they were all taken up. Since 1850 about 

 15,000,000 acres of pine land have been cut-over. 

 Every inducement that human ingenuity could devise 

 and that the state and the land men could afford 

 have been offered for the settlement of that cut-over 

 land, and yet a very small proportion of it is now 

 under cultivation. The census figures for 1910 show: 



Even if this rate of settlement could be maintained 

 it would be 150 years before all that cut-over land 

 would be put to work producing farm crops. But 

 that rate will not be maintained. The fact that it 

 never has been maintained anywhere else is sufficient 

 proof of that. Some of the counties of southeastern 

 Minnesota with their more favorable climate and rich 

 hardwood soils are even now 30 per cent wooded 

 after a hundred years of settlement. Massachusetts 

 and Connecticut with the densest population and the 

 best markets in the country are respectively 50 per 

 cent and 60 per cent forest after 300 years of settle- 

 ment. Germany with a population more than ten 

 times as dense as Minnesota and two thousand years 

 of history is still over 25 per cent forest. 



Farm all the lands? It simply can't be done. The 

 experience of the world for the past thousand years is 

 there to prove it. 



Then why bang away any longer on this impossible 

 theory? Why waste our energy and our wealth try- 

 ing to accomplish the impossible? A thousand years 



17 



