Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/588

578 Again, although the cotton States of the Atlantic coast will not be great producers of grain, especially of wheat, yet in the Southwest—in Texas, Oklahoma, the Indian Territory and Louisiana—we could readily produce the entire wheat crop of the United States upon unoccupied land, whenever labor and capital can be found sufficient to develop the product. As our country people say, a dollar a bushel would fetch it. Some of the best hard or macaroni wheat in the world is already produced in this section.

I have called the attention of economists to the basis of this development of agriculture, namely, what may be called the free land tenure established in the United States. An outsider should deal with the conditions of other countries with great caution, but in the study which I have given to the subject it has seemed to me very plain that the feudal land system of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland had come to its necessary end, witnessed by the present movement for the practical confiscation of land titles in Ireland. One may ask, what would be the potential of the land of the United Kingdom in the production of food for its own population, if the purchase and sale of land were as free as it is in the United States?

Again, it appears to an outsider as if the revulsion from the feudal system in France and large parts of Germany, where the land is cut up in little patches, had also failed in developing the potential of the soil, the application of modern mechanism to its full effect being rendered impossible by the great subdivision of the soil.

You will remark that the area of the United States, omitting Alaska, covers three million (3,000,000) square miles; the habitable part of Canada may be computed at over two million (2,000,000), to which we may add Mexico, giving in all, say over five million (5,000,000) square miles, of which more than one-half is available for cultivation. At nine thousand (9,000) to ten thousand (10,000) bushels to a square mile, which is rather a low standard of intelligent cultivation, ten (10) per cent, of this area, or two hundred and fifty thousand (250,000) square miles, would yield about the present wheat crop of the world. I think we could spare that area without missing it, even within the limits of the United States, if we could make a contract for a term of years at thirty-two (32) shillings a quarter in London for all the wheat Europe could possibly buy.

Even if this forecast be considered visionary, it may be surely held that the United States can supply for many years to come the entire deficiency in the wheat crop of the United Kingdom, twenty-five million (25,000,000) to thirty million (30,000,000) quarters a year, probably by improvement in intensive farming, without adding materially to the land which may be devoted to the wheat crop.

In this paper I have given the details of the grain problem. Cotton