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DUTTON. 
derfully low rates. The first effect of this was to make 
farming in the newly opened districts highly profitable. 
Good profits and unlimited cheap land made more farmers. 
Improved agricultural machinery made larger crops with 
a given amount of labor. Our own Government adopted 
the policy of giving away land at a nominal price to 
whomsoever would take it and use it, inviting settlers 
from all quarters of the earth, except China, to come and 
occupy it. Meantime Australia and the Argentine Republic 
adopted a public land policy differing in details, but amount¬ 
ing to the same thing in the end. In India the government 
fostered the opening of wheat lands, and set millions of ryots 
at work producing wheat for the world’s markets. Thus the 
force of governmental policy and action was added to the 
forces already powerfully at work, tending to make agri¬ 
culture less and less profitable. With almost unlimited ex¬ 
panses of the finest agricultural land given away without 
price, with marvelous improvements of machinery for in¬ 
creasing the produce of agricultural labor, with still more 
marvelous reduction of the cost of transportation and dis¬ 
tribution of the produce, the number of farms has been 
enormously and disproportionately multiplied, until the 
markets of the world have been gorged and broken down 
with a surfeit of the first fruits of the soil. The profits of 
farming have greatly fallen all over the world, and the cause 
is excessive production of surplus products. Dakota and 
California are competing with India, Russia, and Australia 
in the principal market of the world, Great Britain, where 
their surplus is most largely taken and where its prices are 
inevitably determined according to the law of demand and 
supply. The cotton crop of the South has scarcely any com¬ 
petitor except itself, but so vast has been the increase of product 
and so greatly has the use of wool and other fibers increased 
that the supply of cotton has grown more rapidly than the 
demand. This has been a great blessing to the rest of the 
world, but has been the cause of diminished profits to the 
farmer. He feels it keenly, and yet it would seem that he has 
