LAND AND OTHER AGENTS OF PRODUCTION 197 



exhausted of their contents. However, the situation described is not 

 so serious as might be thought. Vast quantities of land which have 

 passed out of the hands of the government, through patents to states, 

 to schools and colleges, to railways, etc., have not yet come under 

 cultivation and occupation. Other large quantities are in the hands 

 of private owners, who have never cultivated them, or, at least, have 

 not done so bonafide, having taken them speculatively and kept -up 

 a merely formal compliance with the requirements of the law. Con- 

 siderable additions to the public lands may also be expected from the 

 reduction of Indian reservations, as the tribes concerned take up 

 small lots in severalty and cede the remainder to the United States. 

 Some parts of the extensive mineral and coal lands, withdrawn from 

 the scope of the general land law, will unquestionably be found to 

 have an agricultural value; and the surface will be worked for one 

 kind of wealth while the recesses beneath are searched for another. 

 It is, moreover, not improbable that the lands of the subhumid 

 region, large parts of which, on the eastern side of this great longitu- 

 dinal belt, have already been taken up and are under cultivation with 

 varying success, large parts of which still remain open to settlement, 

 may be found to have a somewhat wider adaption to agricultural pur- 

 poses than is assigned them by Major Powell. There remains, more- 

 over, to be brought into account the body of lands in the arid region, 

 fairly subject to irrigation, which may be taken up under the desert- 

 land act, and for which a sufficient amount of water is now found in 

 the streams. The aggregate extent of these lands is stated by the 

 Public Land Commission at 30,000,000 acres. There is reason to 

 believe that large portions of this will soon, and all of it eventually, 

 be made productive by systems of reservoirs and irrigating canals. 



As the joint effect of all these considerations, I reach the conclu- 

 sion that it is not unreasonable to suppose that the extent of lands 

 actually occupied for the production of exportable crops may go on 

 increasing to the close of the century. Supposing the amount of 

 arable lands in the possession of individuals disposed to cultivate 

 them to attain, at that date, its maximum, the further question arises: 

 What term may then be allowed us, as a people, for continuing our 

 traditional system of cropping, with something like the degree of 

 immediate profit to the owner of the soil (for, let it be borne in mind, 

 it has never been the greed of occupiers who were not owners which 

 has led to the steady pursuit of this system in the past) which has 

 heretofore attended it ? 



