17 



American — Sir Thomas Shaughnessy — crossed over into Canada and to-day 

 controls the destinies of the Dominion's greatest railroad. Mr. Hiii 

 received me with the utmost cordiality and gave me the greater part of a 

 forenoon to the discussion of rural problems. He is a profound believer 

 in the necessity of conserving the natural resources of the State, and lays 

 special emphasis on the value of small farms and the maintenance of 

 fertility by the rotation of crops ; and his words " Show me a large farm 

 and I will show you a farm full of weeds and badly cultivated," seem 

 deserving of our attention. His agricultural gospel may be summed up 

 in a single sentence : Small holdings, well tilled, and the maintenance of 

 fertility by manure. In England, Denmark, and Holland where the 

 farms are small and well cultivated the yields are high ; but in the United 

 States, Russia, and Australia where too often the ground is merely 

 scratched the average yield per acre is lamentably low. Speaking of 

 agricultural education, Mr. Hill said : " You can't bring all farmers to 

 an agricultural college ; therefore you must train men to go out amongst 

 them to make experiments in growing seeds, breeding new plants, and 

 feeding animals and the like, things a farmer cannot well do by himself. 

 I have advocated the taking over of fifty agricultural counties in the 

 State of Minnesota and placing them under the care of graduates of the 

 State College of Agriculture. Each expert could take charge of ten or 

 twelve farms and prepare, say, one or two acres on each farm for seeding to 

 wheat. Give the farmer the purest seed and show him how to raise thirty 

 bushels of wheat to the acre in place of the 8-12 bushels of the Red River 

 Valley, and so on with other crops. But use acre plots, not anvthing 

 less/' 



Touching land settlement, Mr. Hill laid great emphasis on the value 

 of the Homestead Act in the development of America, notwithstanding 

 the abuses which have arisen in connection with its administration. Then 

 turning to South Africa he said : " Offer free land to settlers, but look 

 well to the character of your immigrants. Consider quality rather than 

 quantity. The stream will never rise above its source. If you poison 

 your country with an inferior class of settlers the whole land will 

 ultimately become infected." 



Hill was the first to formulate the now widely accepted railroad policy 

 ci the West. That is to say, he never waited for population, but boldly pushed 

 his lines across the deserts to the Pacific Coast,* and is to-day reaping the 

 rich reward of his courageous enterprise in enormous freight and passenger 

 traffic. So he laid the Great Northern rails for a thousand miles over 

 the prairies of the North- West and then sent his immigration agents far 

 and wide throughout the world to bid the poor but sturdy peasant 

 "welcome" to the free lands beyond the sea. 



I have already written in the pages of the Transvaal Agricultural 

 Journal of the great work which has been done by the A gri cultural School 

 and College of the University of Minnesota. But two things impressed 

 me during this last visit. In the first place, I happened to be present 

 at the annual Alumni banquet of the School of Agriculture and listened 

 that evening to three Senators discoursing on the agricultural bills which 



* On 10th May, 1909, forty years had elapsed since the rails of the Union Pacific moving 

 westward met the rails of the Central Pacific moving eastward, at Promontory Point, near 

 Ogden, Utah, and the first transcontinental railway was completed. Six railroads now span 

 the United States, and 230,000 miles, or 47 per cent, of the railway system of the entire 

 world, have been built. 



