Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/224

220 two and one fourth million of people, and with the density of France would have more than four times as many, or nearly ten and one half million. Iowa now has 13.39 acres of improved farm land for each one of her population. With the greater density she would have about three acres for each person, while France now has two and one third acres. In general fertility the odds are probably in favor of Iowa.

The mineral output of France is now relatively much greater than that of the prairie state, but it is by no means certain that the ratio would be maintained under full development of the new region, whose building stones, clays and gypsum are but in their commercial beginnings. In that prime necessity, coal, Iowa has quite the advantage, for she mines annually 2 tons for each resident, against ton in France. The latter people imports much fuel, while the vast resources of Iowa for the most part lie still beneath the surface. Not many are probably aware that Iowa has 7,000 square miles of forest, more than at any previous time within the ken of the white man. She has, indeed, nearly as much forest for the proposed ten million people, as France now has for an equal number. It seems reasonable, therefore, to forecast for the prairies an occupation as dense as that of France or Austria.

It would be fatal to the peace of any student to omit the west in such a discussion as this. The writer recently made before the International Geographic Congress at Geneva what seemed to him the moderate and innocent assertion, that the center of our population would always remain some distance east of the geographic center of the United States. He was sharply reminded by a fellow American that such sentiments openly expressed on the Pacific Coast would make him the subject of a lynching excursion. As he is at present at a safe distance he retains his view, but is willing to accept tentatively a generous prophecy for the Cordilleras. Suppose we take seventy-five per cent, of the figure already hazarded for the areas of reclamation, or 60,000,000. And that we may not seem to be dominated by cramped eastern notions, let us concede, since no data are available, that when the arid lands are turned into paradise and a full trade established up and down the Pacific and across its wide waters, that the coast and its cities, the wet belt of the border, the mining centers, mountain valleys and arid pastures will harbor an additional 40,000,000 people. This allows 100,000,000 people west of the prairies, a region that in 1900 had a population of 4,654,818 and a density of 3.5. Here is an increase of twentyone and a half times, a proposal which can hardly be charged with parsimony, and raises our total for the whole country to 305,000,000. If we think the Cordilleran estimate out of bounds, it would yet be easy on the basis of European comparisons to find place for compensating millions in some of the geographic regions east of the Mississippi Eiver.