PRESENT PROBLEMS 225 



level of food prices permits a normal development of civilization. 

 Not only has America a better food supply than Europe, but the 

 barriers to commerce have been so far broken down as to make the 

 food supply of the whole world available at our great centres. 



A new civilization is now possible to which those of the past 

 can offer few analogies. Individual struggle has practically ceased. 

 A sufficiency of food comes to the unskilled laborer, and the increase 

 of population, even when augmented by a million immigrants a 

 year, does not increase the pressure. We have higher standards 

 to-day with 80,000,000 people than we had two generations ago 

 with 40,000,000 people, and we could support 300,000,000 with as 

 great ease and with as little individual struggle. Surely this is 

 a break of a magnitude that the world has never before seen, and 

 should be followed not only by a great uplift in social standards 

 but also by changes in traditions, institutions, and ideals that will 

 separate our civilization from its predecessors and give it not only 

 perpetuity but breadth. 



The facts on which this judgment rests are so familiar that they 

 will, I fear, make dry reading. Our resources and growth have been 

 often pictured, but men do not realize what they mean. They think 

 of our traditions, institutions, and ideals, transferred in the main 

 from other civilizations, as unchangeable possessions, and fail to see 

 the growth and transformation through which all things social go. 

 I must repeat these familiar facts, however, to make my point 

 as to the present importance of the economic interpretation of 

 history. 



The Great Central Plain of North America is a vast storehouse 

 of food. We have the wheat that Europe has, but we have it more 

 abundantly. We have more extensive grazing regions, and with 

 corn for fodder have superior facilities for raising cattle. Pork 

 never took its proper place in the diet of the world until the great 

 cornfields of the West came into existence. Of all these staple 

 articles of ancestral diet vast quantities more might be raised without 

 putting undue pressure on the soil. Our warm summers and clear 

 climate make root crops even more productive than the cereals. 

 To think of the changes in diet that the cheapening of sugar has 

 made is to realize in a measure what an increase of population will 

 follow the full utilization of available root crops. We have com- 

 bined the resources on which the civilization of North Europe de- 

 pends and those which made the ancient civilizations of the South. 

 The emigrants from South Europe find here a possible diet like 

 that of their home countries, and in its use they evoke qualities 

 in our soil that lay dormant as long as the Northern races were fed 

 from it. 



In addition to these home possibilities the nearness and access- 



