Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/215

Rh raise our wealth per capita, and not "cause two unhappy human beings to live where one lived before."

It is proposed here to attend more to the means of approaching the problem, than to the study of figures, which last in writings on population, are usually guesses supported by vague and inapplicable comparisons with China. As the writer has said elsewhere, it is not of interest to know how many Chinese could exist on American soil, but how many occidental citizens could live here in comfort and progress.

The largest single element in our problem must always be food. Other things are important, but for simplicity we take this singly, in relation to the resources of our own domain. There are several ways in which our food supply can be increased, and first of all, without raising the sum of products, they can be enlarged in their availability. No one familiar with culinary matters can avoid the belief that there is great loss through misuse and positive waste. Unskilled treatment alone is responsible for much loss of nutritive values and prodigality is to be found on private tables, while consumption in public places is attended oftentimes with destruction that is well-nigh criminal. The rise of industrial and domestic science will in part correct the evil, and any ultimate approach to a narrow margin between food and mouths would be felt in resulting economies.

No one doubts that our food supply could be much increased by more scientific and intensive cultivation of lands which are now actually under the plow. Here indeed we are already beginning a cheerful and significant era of hope and achievement. The farmer is becoming a wiser man and many things are helping him in his unfolding. This came home to us recently in the story of a farmer in western New York, who started poor four years ago, has paid for a large farm property with four crops, and expects out of the fifth to build a mansion for his family.

The American farmer is learning to adapt his crop to his soil and to his market. This is the teaching of the United States Bureau of Soil Survey, in its field work and in its reports. It is the burden of the agricultural college and of the experiment station, and the agricultural explorer of the department in Washington is searching widely in aid of something fit and good to fill every arable American acre. Adaptation will increase the product of food, as will also the more intelligent and energetic use of fertilizers. Intelligence will find the fertilizer and put it where it will do the greatest good, and will stimulate the energy in its use which is now sadly lacking. Let any man traverse the country regions in the eastern states and he will pass innumerable poor and hungry farms, and the greater the natural leanness of the soil, the more sure is he to see the manure-heap leaching, often for the second year, in the farm yard.

In like degree are our resources now wasted through the prevalent