GEOGRAPHICAL CONCENTRATION. 13 



That tide of population which has been gradually rolling 

 westward has brought one state after another under the 

 dominion of the plow, each being largely devoted, in turn, 

 to the cultivation of a very limited number of products, se- 

 lected with regard to facility of cultivation and the promise 

 of a speedy return. Reaching the central Mississippi valley 

 that tide of population the simile is both apt and conven- 

 ient spread itself out over a wide expanse of country, the 

 soil of which, if not more fertile than that of the Eastern 

 States, was at least more uniformly susceptible of cultivation. 

 Here under those generous conditions of the United States land 

 laws which made the land practically a free gift 100,000,000 

 acres and more were within a very few years converted into 

 farms, and upon those farms the leading cereals have been 

 cultivated on a scale of unexampled magnitude and with an 

 unprecedented geographical concentration. To such an ex- 

 tent has that concentration been carried in certain portions 

 of that remarkable region that in 1889 the state of Illinois 

 had no less than 39 per cent of its entire land surface de- 

 voted to the cultivation of corn, wheat and oats, notwith- 

 standing the large number of its towns and cities, including 

 Chicago, its 10, 116 miles of railroad, its thousands of miles 

 of public highways, and that tendency toward a greater di- 

 versification which even at that time had had a marked effect 

 upon the agriculture of the state. 



The center of cereal production, however, has always been 

 in advance of the center of population, and as surely as that 

 branch of industry has succeeded the pastoral, so surely has 

 it been, itself, gradually supplanted by that more diversified 

 system of farming which has been rendered necessary by the 

 requirements of a population increasing not merely in num- 

 bers, but also in the multiplicity of its wants. Hence, while 

 some of the older agricultural states have, until within the 



