Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/583

Rh as can be seen by the average size of farms in the twelve States. In 1890, this was 86 acres in Michigan, 93 in Ohio, 103 in Indiana, 115 in Wisconsin, 127 in Illinois, 139 in Missouri, 151 in Iowa, 160 in Minnesota, 181 in Kansas, 190 in Nebraska, 237 in South Dakota and 277 in North Dakota. Ohio and Michigan have been the longest settled, while the two Dakotas are not yet wholly occupied by farmers.

On the frontier, the wild land from the government has a value of $1.35 per acre. The railroad grant lands have been usually purchased by farmers at from $4 to $7 per acre and are now being sold at these figures. The average value of farms with improvements in the old settled States, such as Ohio, is not far from $50 per acre. The difference measures the improvements made to the land. To open up new land and make these improvements requires capital. The original settlers, being without capital, were under the necessity of securing credit, either from the railroad companies from whom they purchased the land or from money lenders; hence there grew up in these western States a very extensive system of borrowing on mortgages, beneficial both to borrower and lender, until the speculative mortgage companies promoted the taking up of great areas of land in the semiarid regions, negotiating mortgages thereon, and thus brought disaster to many lenders, culminating in bankruptcy of many mortgage companies.

The average term of mortgages made for land improvements, as above outlined, has been in the past from three to nine years, and that period of time has usually, except in the semi-arid lands, sufficed to enable the settlers to pay off their debts and to acquire valuable farms from their neighbors.

These figures are sustained by the judgment of the experts now occupied in compiling the census of the year 1900, in which the departments of agriculture and of wealth, debt and taxation are under the supervision of the most competent man in the United States, Mr. L. G. Powers.

It will be plain to any Englishman that unless this land had been free land, bought, sold and conveyed with the least amount of expense and difficulty, and free of any conditions as to the kind of crop to be planted or the disposal of the product, no such great economic revolution could have occurred. Yet the conveyance of land is now being made more simple than ever before by the adoption, in State after State, of a reform which we owe to our intelligent and progressive kindred in Australasia, the registry of titles known as the Torrens System, in place of the registry of deeds. Under this system conveyance of a title to land under absolutely safe conditions has become as simple and as easy as an assignment of a note of hand or a share of stock.