Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/491

Rh iron products. If physiography is the arbiter, the southern shore of Lake Erie, before many years, will be the center of steel and iron production in this country. The Pennsylvania center of this industry has a momentum and a capital investment that will enable it to stand out long against the logic of geography. Allied with this conservatism are the artificial combinations which tend always to restrain the development of new manufacturing centers. But such commercial egoism will in time recognize the greater advantage in conforming to geographic laws. In reference to a particular nation it is probable that ultimate stability will be reached in the industries concerned largely with the inorganic. After the resources of a country have been thoroughly exploited, equilibrium should come, and be disturbed only by responses made to world-wide influences of commerce. But in this country we are still far from stability in the localization of industries; for example, the center of shoe manufacturing has steadily progressed westward; flour milling left Baltimore for Rochester, and moved later to Minneapolis whence it promises to shift again before many years; slaughtering and meat packing, once centered at Cincinnati, later at Chicago, probably now centers west of the Mississippi.

But an almost equally important factor in the shifting of the steel industry is associated with shipping facilities for the finished products. In this respect, northern Ohio has even now an advantage. With the insured growth of New Orleans as a transfer port for marine cargoes a larger relative proportion of finished steel products will go southward.

The earliest effort in this country to facilitate transportation found expression, as already described, in highway construction. This movement was side-tracked when attention was given to canals and later to railroads. These larger needs, involving the final and longest haul for agricultural products, at least, so monopolized thought that we forgot the first step in the route between the farmer and consumer. Early last t century Ohio was given an object lesson in highway construction when I the national road from Wheeling, W. Va., crossed the central part of U the state. Ohio should have excellent roadways. The state now ranks first in the annual production of road-making limestone. This fact should exert an important influence in the future agricultural progress of the state.

The pasture lands of Ohio have always been important and even at the present time they constitute about one third of the area of the tilled lands. The eastern and southeastern parts of the state, the portion encompassed by the Pennsylvanian formations, contain relatively a larger amount of pasture lands. For several decades Ohio was the