24 AMERICAN FARMS. 



animal life to find its highest end in man ; and the con- 

 sumption of man to return again to the soil. But a 

 man, whose demand upon the soil once required an 

 average of eight hundred acres to supply him with 

 sufficient food, may now be better supplied with the 

 products of a single acre. Through the intelligent 

 guidance of man, what then may be the possibilities of 

 the productive capacity of land ? 



That man has abused all these favorable natural con- 

 ditions is patent to those who study the subject. The 

 abuse is proved in the success which has attended, in 

 all cases, proper care to return to the land its due. 

 We have now about one and one half billions of peo- 

 ple sustained on the surface of the globe. What, in the 

 correct evolution of the productive powers of the earth, 

 is there to prevent its sustaining one hundred times as 

 many ? With these numbers so many times increased, 

 not a particle of matter would be destroyed any more 

 than now. 



As the question refers to America, deduction from 

 scientific argument gives the following result : " In Eng- 

 land the density of population is about 389 persons per 

 square mile ; but England is in some measure the work- 

 shop of the world, and supports, by her foreign trade, a 

 greater population than the soil can nourish. In France 

 the density of population is about 177 ; in Germany it 

 varies from 100 to 200. On these grounds we may 

 assume that the number of persons which a square mile 

 can properly sustain, without generating the pressure of 

 a redundant population, is 150 at the latitude of 50,° and 

 26 is the number which expresses the productiveness of 

 this parallel. Then taking, for the sake of simplicity, 35 

 as the index of the productiveness of the useful soil be- 



