LAND AND OTHER AGENTS OF PRODUCTION 199 



Down to this time our apparently wasteful culture has, as I have 

 sought to show, been the true economy of the national strength; our 

 apparent abuse of the capital fund of the country has, in fact, effected 

 the highest possible improvement of the public patrimony. Forty- 

 eight noble states, in an indissoluble union, are the ample justification 

 of this policy. Their schoolhouses and churches, their shops and 

 factories, their roads and bridges, their railways and warehouses, are 

 the fruits of the characteristic American agriculture of the past. 



But from a time not far distant, if indeed it has not already 

 arrived, a continuance in this policy will be, not the improvement of 

 our patrimony, but the impoverishment of our posterity. There will 

 be all the difference between the past and the future, in this respect, 

 morally, economically, and patriotically considered, which there is 

 between the act of the strong, courageous, hopeful young man who 

 puts a mortgage on his new farm that he may stock it and equip it 

 for a higher productiveness, and the act of the self-indulgent man of 

 middle life who encumbers his estate for the purposes of personal 

 consumption. 



57. THE FUTURE USE OF LAND IN THE UNITED STATES 1 

 BY RAPHAEL ZON 



In a new country, with a wealth of land and a scanty population, 

 the use to which the land is first put cannot serve as an indication of 

 its best ultimate use. Gradually, as the population increases and the 

 knowledge of the properties of the different classes of land grows, 

 there is a closer correspondence between the character of the land and 

 the crops to which it is devoted. In such densely populated countries 

 as Belgium and France, practically every acre of land is put to its most 

 appropriate use. Thus in France, for instance, 83 per cent of the 

 poorer sandstone soils is forested, while of the fertile alluvial soils 

 only 5 per cent is under forest. More than half (56 per cent) of the 

 French forests are on non-agricultural, calcareous soils. But in this 

 country there are still thousands of acres naturally adapted to agri- 

 culture which are now under forest growth, chiefly hardwoods; and 

 there are many slopes cleared of timber and turned into pastures or 

 fields which in a few years become washed out and had best be kept 

 under forest cover. 



1 Adapted from Circular No. 159, Forest Service, United States Department of 

 Agriculture, pp. 4-15. 



