West is no more exempt than New England or the South. The soil of 

 the West is being reduced in agricultural potency by exactly the same 

 processes which have driven the farmer of the East, with all his ad- 

 vantage of nearness to markets, from the field. 



Within the last forty years a great part of the richest land in the 

 country has been brought under cultivation. We should, therefore, in 

 the same time, have raised proportionately the yield of our principal 

 crops per acre; because the yield of old lands, if properly treated, 

 tends to increase rather than diminish. The year 1906 was one of 

 large crops, and can scarcely be taken as a standard. We produced, 

 for example, more corn that year than had ever been grown in the 

 United States in a single year before. But the average yield per acre 

 was less than it was in 1872. We are barely keeping the acre product 

 stationary. The average wheat crop of the country now ranges from 

 twelve and one half, in ordinary years, to fifteen bushels per acre in 

 the best seasons. And so it is on down the line. 



Not only the economic but the political future is involved. No peo- 

 ple ever felt the want of work or the pinch of poverty for a long time 

 without reaching out violent hands against their political institutions, 

 believing that they might find in a change some relief from their dis- 

 tress. Although there have been moments of such restlessness in our 

 country, the trial has never been so severe or so prolonged as to put us 

 to the test. It is interesting that one of the ablest men in England 

 during ,the last century, a historian of high merit, a statesman who 

 saw active service and a profound student of men and things, put on 

 record his prophecy of such a future ordeal. Writing to an American 

 correspondent fifty years ago. Lord Macaulay used these words : 

 "As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied 

 land, your laboring population will be found more at ease than the 

 laboring population of the Old World ; but the time will come when 

 wages will be as low and will fluctuate as much with you as they do 

 with us. Then your institutions will be brought to the test. Distress 

 everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented and inclines 

 him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a 

 monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million and another 

 can not get a full meal. * * * The day will come when the multitudes 

 of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast or ex- 

 pects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a legislature. Is it 

 possible to doubt what sort of legislature will be chosen? * * 

 There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoilation will increase the 

 distress ; the distress will produce a fresh spoilation. * Either 



civilization or liberty will perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon 

 will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your republic 

 will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the 

 twentieth century as the Roman Empire in the fifth." We need not 

 accept this gloomy picture too literally, but we have been already 

 sufficiently warned to prevent us from dismissing the subject as un- 

 worthy of attention. Every nation finds its hour of peril when there 

 is no longer free access to the land, or when the land will no longer 

 support the people. " : Far may this day be from us. But since 



the unnecessary destruction of our land will bring new conditions of 



66 



