GEOGRAPHICAL CONCENTRATION : 



fln Historic Feature of American Agriculture. 



In that marvelous series of pictures illustrative of the 

 national growth, geographical distribution, and material 

 progress of the people of the United States, presented to the 

 country and the world in the reports of successive decennial 

 censuses, the most conspicuous feature is agriculture, the 

 central figure the husbandman. Whether considered with 

 regard to the number of persons to whom, directly or in- 

 directly, it gives employment, to its close relation to the 

 social system of the country, to the volume and value of its. 

 products or to the relation of those products to our trade with 

 other nations, American agriculture is a subject of large di- 

 mensions. No single event in the history of the Republic 

 nor any of those triumphs of inventive genius and construc- 

 tive skill which mark our onward march as a people ; not 

 even that mighty westward movement of population which,, 

 long before it had attained the volume we have witnessed in 

 our own day, excited the astonishment of the civilized world 

 and seemed to the philosophic historian of Europe to have all 

 the grandeur and solemnity of a providential event, none of 

 them, to my mind, possesses greater significance or is more 

 beneficent and far-reaching, at least in its direct results, than 

 are the transformation, on so unexampled a scale, of forest 

 and prairie into smiling cornfields and fruitful orchards and 

 that prodigious annual ingathering of the fruits of the earth 



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