homes with electric light rather than pine-knots or candles. It is not for them to be choosers. They must take what they can get.

So the first settlers of any country must take the lands they can get with such labor and such appliances as they have at command. Naturally, they will seek out the high-lying, dry lands, which require no drainage, and which can be plowed with a crooked stick, and harrowed with a bush. And if they get five to eight bushels of wheat to the acre, they will think themselves very fortunate.

The Drainage Problem.

"What brought you up here, with all those rich prairies lying below you?" asked Henry C. Carey of the first settler of Wisconsin, when he had recovered his breath, after climbing the Blue Mound. "Come and I will show you eight hundred acres of land that needs no drainage," was the man's answer.

That is the meaning of the "abandoned farms" of the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts, and of the smokeless chimneys along the old hill roads of eastern Pennsylvania. The people have left those dry places and gone down to the richer lands of the river-valleys, since the growth of industrial forces has enabled them to "pass from what is worse to what is better" in land, as in everything else. All the world over the progress of tillage has been down the hillsides to the valley lands, where far more labor must be expended in reclamation, but the returns have still more exceeded the outlay of labor.

The British Islands, whose land system the Ricardoan theory was devised to explain, prove this theory of settle

ment to the hilt. Take John Richard Green's book, "The Making of England'' (1882), with its many maps of the movement of the invading Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and the rest, in the fifth and sixth centuries. See how they fought for every dry and comparatively barren range of chalk-hills and mountain sides, with the conviction that they were getting from the Celtic Britons the best of the island. Then compare those prized districts with the stretches of fen and flat, which were to become the wheatfields of later England. The "best lands" of the first settlers are turnipfields and sheep pasture in later times, being good for nothing better. So in Scotland, as the late Duke of Argyle observes in his little book, "Iona," the marks of the plough and the spade on the hillside are the traces of a rude and unprofitable husbandry, which was practiced when the richer lands lay covered with marsh and fen, haunted by wild birds and wild animals.

When People Starved.

What made the shift from poor to rich lands possible? The growth of numbers and the consequent growth of industrial association. In the presence of Nature's resistances to our obtaining what we want for our subsistence and our comfort, a few men are almost powerless. They die of hunger sometimes, in the presence of an abundance they cannot reach. When the present area of our country was populated by a quarter of a million Indians, these frequently suffered from famine. When the first handful of settlers crossed the ocean, they chose such barren spots as Plymouth for their homes, and starved on a few grains of Indian corn through

the New England winter. To-day, we feed a hundred millions at home, and we export food for millions more.

Association a Factor.

Association, as Carey uses the word, is the greatest fact in the economic life of the modern world. It is the interlacing of human lives for mutual help dividing up the work of the world, so that each holds his place for the service of all. By adding man to man it multiplies (not adds) the industrial power. Its instrument is money, and its materials, men. By spending one cent for the purchase of a newspaper, I am brought into industrial association with the newsboy who sold it; with the news-agent who supplied him; with the publishers, the editors, the type-setters and pressmen; with the news-gatherers, the telegraph lines, the type-founders, the pressmakers, the miners, the paper makers, etc., etc. I come into industrial association with some twenty-thousand people to the extent of one cent. All are benefited by the transaction, and live by a multitude like it. For one man to have made that newspaper would have been a sheer impossibility.

This blending of human energies is the most striking characteristic of the modern world. There is nothing like it in primitive society, and not much in the Greek and Roman world. It is that which lifts us out of the weakness and poverty of earlier ages, and makes us all partners in a great co-operative system, from which we derive large returns for our outlay of time and strength. And it has grown out of the personal and individual liberty of each to make what he will of his own life, and to profit for himself by serving others. That results equally excellent could have been

planned by the united activity and intelligence of a few planners, such as Socialism proposes to subject us to, is far from likely. As a matter of fact, it never has. Those who plan new forms of society, from Plato to William Morris, show a poverty of imagination, which is beggared by fact.

Why Men Pay Rent.

Ricardo tells us that when people hire land by the payment of rent, they are paying for "the natural and inalienable properties of the soil." This is another false premise of his theory. What men pay rent for are the results of human labor, expended either upon that piece of land, or upon other land in its neighborhood. Usually the former is called "the earned increment" of value, and the latter "the unearned increment." These phrases are objectionable as implying that the land, at the outset, had a value independent of both kinds of labor. Land by itself-that is mere soil has no value-is worthless, in fact. What commands price or rent is the farm, and not the mere soil. And a farm, as Lord Dufferin says, is as truly a manufactured article as is a ship. Nature, indeed, furnishes the raw materials in the case of both, but it is human labor which confers upon each those especial utilities which command price or hire.

John Stuart Mill received this statement from Carey with some astonishment. "Does Mr. Carey mean to say that if an island rose in the North Sea, it would have no value and could command no rent? "Suppose your island rose in the northern Pacific Ocean, midway between California and Japan," replied Carey, "what would its value be

then? In the North Sea it would be worth something because of its proximity to the reclaimed and cultivated lands of Great Britain. But not so in the north Pacific." The same law holds everywhere. An acre of stony New Hampshire is worth more than a square mile of the Amazon Valley, although the latter is the most fertile soil in the world. An acre of sandy New Jersey is worth six of the loamy soil of Mississippi.

Resources and Wealth.

It is a great mistake to confound resources with wealth. They are but the possibility of it, and its actuality comes through human labor, working in association with our fellows. Hence the wisdom of our Homestead policy, which made over to actual settlers for a trifling payment land enough for a home They made a dear purchase who accepted the offer, but the country has profitted by the endurance and self-sacrifice, with which those settlers have built up society in the Middle West. Yet our conservationists incline to think we should have only leased those homesteads, and made their settlers pay rent to the government. Would any such prospect have brought to our public domain the millions of industrious settlers, who have made that section what it is?

The finest farming in the world is. that which is found in the most densely peopled portion of Europe-the northern or Flemish provinces of Belgium, lying between Liege and Antwerp. The farms are small, and usually are the property of those who till them. Seven or eight acres is regarded as a respectable size for a farm. The soil is naturally poor, and has been reclaimed under

the incentive of the passion for a home and a bit of land. Not a weed is allowed to deface the soil. The number of cattle is very large in proportion to the area of the province. Moreover, the farmers save more from their income than is true of any other farming population. The population is 1600 to the square mile, while Europe averages but 270; and all are fed from the farms, as the manufactures are few. The reason of this success is that this was once the richest manufacturing country in Europe, and remained so until the invention of the steam engine destroyed its manufactures and drove the people to farming. They carried into their tillage the habits of care and thrift which they had acquired as manufacturers, and so avoided waste of every kind. If England were so tilled, she would have food for all her population, and grain for export. As Edward Atkinson says much. of the world's farming has been treating the land as one might a stone quarry; but we must come to deal with it as with an alembic.

The Motive of Ownership.

American farming has the merit of employing the motive of ownership to toil and sacrifice. But much of it has been little else than land-butchery. The Germans of eastern Pennsylvania are an exception, as they alone make land. more and not less productive with every decade. I have seen farms which have been tilled for one hundred and fifty years, with crops of wheat and clover which made one's heart glad merely to look at them. But the New Englanders. are the worst farmers. They have used up one area of wheat-lands after anoth