LAND AND OTHER AGENTS OF PRODUCTION 191 



a gg re g at i n g more than 500,000,000 acres, has been occupied by 

 settlers within the last fifty years. What is there left for the next 

 fifty years ? Excluding arid and irrigable areas, the latter limited by 

 nature, and barely enough of which could be made habitable in each 

 year to furnish a farm for each immigrant family, we have only 

 50,000,000 acres of surveyed and 36,500,000 acres of unsurveyed land 

 as our actual remaining stock. And 21,000,000 acres were disposed 

 of in 1907. How long will the remainder last? No longer can we 

 say that "Uncle Sam has land enough to give us all a farm." 



Equally threatening is the change in quality. There are two ways 

 in which the productive power of the earth is lessened: first by erosion 

 and the sweeping away of the fertile surface into streams and thence 

 to the sea, and second by exhaustion through wrong methods of cul- 

 tivation. The former process has gone far. Thousands of acres in 

 the East and South have been made unfit for tillage. North Carolina 

 was, a century ago, one of the greatest agricultural states of the 

 country and one of the wealthiest. Today as you ride through the 

 South you see everywhere land gullied by torrential rains; red and 

 yellow claybanks exposed where once were fertile fields; and agri- 

 culture reduced because its main support has been washed away. 

 Millions of acres, in places to the extent of one-tenth of the entire 

 arable area, have been so injured that no industry and no care can 

 restore them. 



Far more ruinous, because universal and continuing in its effects, 

 is the process of soil exhaustion. It is creeping over the land from 

 East to West. The abandoned farms that are now the playthings of 

 the city's rich or the game preserves of patrons of sport bear witness 

 to the melancholy change. New Hampshire, Vermont, northern New 

 York, show long lists of them. In western Massachusetts, which once 

 supported a flourishing agriculture, farm properties are now for sale 

 for half the cost of the improvements. Professor Carver, of Harvard, 

 has declared after a personal examination of the country that "agri- 

 culture as an independent industry, able in itself to support a com- 

 munity, does not exist in the hilly parts of New England." 



The same process of deterioration is affecting the farm lands of 

 western New York, Ohio, and Indiana. Where prices of farm lands 

 should rise by increase of population, in many places they are falling. 

 Between 1880 and 1900 the land values of Ohio shrank $60,000,000. 

 Official investigation of two counties in central New York disclosed 

 a condition of agricultural decay. In one, land was for sale for about 



