immigration and a greater birth-rate would have brought toilers in plenty. When the population becomes denser and the struggle for existence harder, when higher prices will pay for heavier work, then it will be cultivated, and not before. On a basis of yield per acre, the country is even now tilling somewhere between five-sixths and five-sevenths of the total holdings.

The handwriting on the wall shows again in our declining lumber production. In a significant paper on the lumber cut of the United States between 1870 and 1920, Reynolds and Pierson, of the Forest Service, show that since the peak of lumber production was reached in 1907 there has been a decline of 27 per cent, in face of an unprecedented demand and an extraordinary rise in prices. We have tapped our last reserve of virgin timber, and within ten years will have forest areas proportionately less than either France or Germany. Who then can speak of frontiers? There are no frontiers.

Another way of measuring agricultural history in rather exact terms is by examining the course of cereal production. Cereals form a high proportion of our totals, and exhibit but slight variations. The returns from the last five census enumerations show that from 40 to 44 per cent of the total improved acreage is always devoted to grain production. The yields per acre in bushels for the census years from 1880 to 1920 have been 22.7, 25.1, 24.0, 23.6, and 21.4. The production per capita has amounted to 53.9, 56.0, 58.4, 49.1, and 44.3 bushels.

These figures are worth examining carefully. Contrary to what we have been led to believe, yield per acre has not risen markedly in the last half-century. It is about the same for cereals to-day that it was in 1880. There is other evidence that production per unit area has risen in numerous cases and is masked by impoverishment of some of the older soils, but gross increase is not very obvious in the records.

We can also read an extraordinary chronicle of our experience as a food-exporting nation in the register of per-capita production-a rapid increase up to 1900, then a still more rapid fall.

Finally, let us examine the trend of meat production and consumption, perhaps the most sensitive measure of the

effect of advancing population density on agriculture. This story always takes the form of a drama in three acts. First, man hunts the wild game; second, he cultivates domestic animals; finally, he kills off his cattle and eats their food himself. We ourselves are nearing the end of the second act, and will be compelled to carry the plot to completion if we continue to grow in numbers, for it takes eight times as much land to feed a man on beef as it does to feed him on grain and vegetables.

One can obtain a fair idea of how things have combined to start us toward a vegetarian diet from the following figures on meat production and consumption per capita during the last half-century. They were compiled from the census records by Professor E. N. Wentworth, who has corrected for the differences in the time of year at which the enumerations were made, for the variations in weight and age at time of marketing, for the differences in the amounts wasted by changes in slaughtering methods, for the varied quantities exported, and for the seasonal fluctuations in consumption.

The meat-consumption curve, including only the three main sources-beef, mutton, and pork-is very striking. It starts with 179 pounds per capita in the decade 1830-1839 and rises slightly to 184 pounds per capita in the last decade of the century. There was a marked decrease in the meats consumed during the Civil War and shortly after, but if one smooths out the figures during this period he finds that the quantity remains pretty close to 182 pounds per capita during the whole Victorian era. Then came a swift drop. Meat consumption per head was 170 pounds during the first decade, and 152 pounds during the second decade; while during the years 1920 to 1922 the figures slumped to 138 pounds.

There is a temptation to prolong this curve and show that in somewhat less than fifty years more there will be seven meatless days a week; but truth prevails. This time will not come in fifty or in any other number of years. There will always be a certain amount of animal food. available to those who are able to pay the price. Nevertheless, the kaleidoscopic change through the first twentytwo years of the present century is a

matter for careful consideration. Some of the per capita reduction may be due to less wasteful methods of meat utilization, but not all of it, by any means.

The record of the existing live stock per capita at each of the last eight census enumerations is still more astonishing. Dairy cattle remains constant, but it stands in lonely isolation in this regard. Beef cattle, with some ups and downs, reaches a maximum of .66 in 1900; from there on the decline is steady and swift, dropping to half this figure in 1920. In sheep and swine, the story is a constant steady reduction, becoming more rapid in recent years. In 1850 there was nearly one sheep and one and one-third porkers for every inhabitant; by 1920 a communistic division would have given each of us only one-third of a sheep and a little over half a pig.

If the above memoranda may stand as read, there is no gainsaying the fact that population pressure is having its effect in the United States. Its irresistible force shows in the history of land reserves, of lumber production, and of crop production. It shows in the altered dietary standards. And it is no argument to say that we own more land than we use, or to point hopefully to the amount of meat still exported. Every country has more land than is actually used. And India exports large quantities of grain, although nine out of ten of her people suffer grievously from malnutrition.

These are some of the more essential facts from which to estimate the weakness and the strength, the folly and the wisdom of American agriculture. One might add to them indefinitely, they would still indicate the same conclusion. The country is indeed a superorganism, and like any ordinary plant or animal, adds cells until the multiplicity of units bring growth to an end. We do not know just where this end will be in the case of the United States, but all signs combine to show that the slowing-down process has begun. Slowly and stealthily the pressure of population is beginning to make itself felt throughout the land rather than in isolated districts.

This does not mean of course that no more people can be supported. One may doubt the wisdom of much further increase in numbers. One may realize that

continued growth will make life harder. But the most varied assortment of doubts is not going to bring population increase to a standstill immediately. Pearl estimates that we tend to a maximum of 200 millions and that for all practical purposes an approximate maximum will be reached in about eighty years. A rather optimistic estimate of the potential agricultural strength gives somewhat over 300 millions as a possibility. Be it the one or the other, the figures are not small. Let one imagine half again as many cities and towns each about half again as large as they are to-day. Let him picture twice or thrice as many people on every farm. Whether the picture is terrifying or attractive depends on one's hopes and desires and prejudices; but no one can deny that the additional mouths will mean a change in habit of life.

We have a potential agricultural capacity sufficient to care for between 200 million and 300 million people. This is real strength. If doubts arise, they concern probabilities rather than possibilities. That is to say, the practical question is whether this tremendous power of food production can really be developed as it should be, slowly, carefully, and efficiently as needed, thus keeping the standard of living worthy of the past and present, or whether our course will be that of China and India, with a mounting death-rate marking the growing fierceness of the struggle.

Effort toward a sounder agriculture has not been wanting. The federal government, the State governments, the people as individuals, have done what seemed necessary to meet the exigencies of the times in food production. To gain more land, huge irrigation and drainage projects have been undertaken at great expense. To increase production, campaigns for spreading knowledge of better farming methods have been made. To eliminate wastage, pest-control methods have been improved, storage systems refined and elaborated, and transportation facilities increased.

This is a record of which any capable people need not be ashamed. Yet I ask the reader to note carefully what the situation is to-day. Our farmers are still largely an unorganized group of strugglers who have been most wretchedly paid for

their labor, and who have profited only by the so-called unearned increment accumulating on their early purchases of lowpriced government land. In face of a negligible reserve of public land, quality considered, confronted by a diminishing natural productiveness of the soils they till, the farmers are asked to provide for additional mouths at the rate of about a million and a half a year.

This job is no sinecure. The farmer will perform it, at least for some years to come; but he is human, and he has resigned the rôle of "angel" for the rest of the country. The emigration records show that he is going to the newer countries-Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil-in no inconsiderable numbers. And he is drifting to the cities where he is better paid, faster than ever before. The proportion of the rural population in the country fell from 54.2 per cent in 1910 to 48.6 per cent in 1920. In other words the farming population increased during the decade by 5.4 per cent, while the cogs in the city industrial machine increased by 25.7 per cent. Thus things are being equalized on the farm and in the city by the old, old law of supply and demand.

The results of these changes with an ever-increasing population are not difficult to forecast. There will be a one-way trail to the cities until perhaps two-thirds of our total are housed in city blocks. Farmers will go cityward until food prices reach such a height that the rewards of farming will equal those in other lines. Then will come a back-to-the-farm movement that no amount of haranguing has yet been able to induce. And when this time arrives the wanderers from the city shop will find the farmers organized, ready to keep their position secure, ready to fight for all they can get, in fact, in the same manner that their own unions fought when they had the power.

After studying the existing facts carefully and seriously, I can imagine the future unrolling in somewhat the following fashion:

With the progress of science and a more thorough diffusion of knowledge than there has been in the past, the development of agriculture should compare favorably with that of mechanical industry. Though the odds are against revolutionary discoveries, there will be a marked

advance in agriculture as an art; and in a country having a considerable density of population, this will require a real metamorphosis in agriculture as a business. As the complexity of the situation increases, thus demanding more and more. in the way of capital and knowledge, both the little farmer and the inefficient farmer will be forced to the wall. There will be a survival of the fittest. Paralleling the tendency of the last twenty years in manufacturing, there will be a trend toward larger units. Successful farming will require competent managers and highly paid specialists, and these can be retained only where there is a relatively large production. To what lengths centralization will go, no one can say. The limit will surely be different in the various branches of husbandry. It is not likely, for example, that individual control can become as extensive in growing fresh vegetables for immediate consumption as in raising wheat and corn. But it seems quite probable that ultimately there will be agricultural undertakings comparable in size and scope to the United States Steel Corporation. They will build up voluntarily because of the advantages offered.

Several co-operative associations are in operation to-day, the most conspicuously successful being the citrus-fruit growers and the tobacco-raisers. These pioneer organizations are doubly worth citing because the reasons calling them into being are different. The California fruit-growers, selling to the consumer as directly as possible, needed to gain a wider market and to increase their efficiency as packers and shippers. The first objective has been attained through advertising, the second through centralization and standardization. The tobacco-raisers, on the other hand, had been selling a relatively non-perishable crop to jobbers who, with the utmost nonchalance, would buy the product of ten acres or ten thousand acres and whose payments were governed by the farmer's necessity rather than by the value of the crop. The objects of this association, therefore, were to distribute selling throughout the year and to give their members financial protection in the meantime.

Eventually one may expect to see every agricultural specialty controlled in this

manner, with interlocking councils to prevent overexpansion in any one line. There will be large farms growing as few crops as the exigencies of scientific farming permit, managed by business executives of high caliber and superintended by men adequately trained in the natural sciences and in farm practice. These farms will be firmly united into mutualbenefit associations having a single directive policy. Planting will be controlled and overproduction prevented. Standardized products will be sold, and sold throughout the year in quantities just meeting the current market demands, thus eliminating outside speculation. Margins now eaten up by middlemen, both from small-quantity buying and from lack of economy in selling, will go to swell the annual balance of the growers themselves. In brief, the methods which have made the American manufacturer successful will make the American farmer successful.

Obviously, prediction of better prospects for the farmer of the future does not mean the prediction of easier times for the rest of us. The rewards for tilling the soil must become equal to those obtained in other occupations or prosperity will bid the country farewell, but the very causes which will bring about this change will also bring about higher prices with all the accompanying economic complications of which higher prices are the symptom. Yields will go up with prices. Mounting returns will bring land into cultivation which cannot now be cultivated profitably. Simultaneously will come a gradual modification of the present standard of living. First, perhaps, will come an increase in the use of milk and milk products. A dairyman can get more food from a cow than a butcher. Later one may expect to see even the dairy business become less and less important. It cannot be otherwise. Such food as is unfit for human consumption will still furnish the packers, the milk-producers, and the cheese and butter makers, with animal products, but grain-fed stock will tend to vanish. We shall turn steadily toward vegetarianism. Legumes and nuts will furnish an ever greater proportion of our proteids. And we shall pay, pay heavily, when even these luxuries are vouchsafed to us.

This brief outline, in my estimation, expresses fairly the probable turn of affairs as the country grows older. It is to be expected as the natural outcome of normal growth. I recommend it to the attention of the reader for the very good reason that the security of preparedness based on past experience is infinitely better than a careless optimism born of ignorance. I am endeavoring to arouse whom I may from that apathy toward rural affairs which comes from treading. the harsh pavements of the city streets. Unquestionably the agricultural situation, though in the larger sense it is not now acute, is worthy the careful thought, the watchful solicitude, of every man and woman among us. The welfare of the farmer touches every home. The primary requisite for a sound national development in the future is a scientific agriculture, a food-supply which cannot be disturbed by any ordinary wave of misfortune. True, this is only one phase of the population problem, but it is something of a keystone to the whole situation. If it should fail us-woe betide.

If we take it upon ourselves to develop a sound, efficient agriculture, properly supported financially, with departments of research, costs, sales, publicity, purchase, and so forth, as in any other great business enterprise, we shall have obtained an industrial insurance policy well worth while. We ought then to be able to live long and prosperously as a nation, settling without difficulty those minor problems of social justice which a handful of capitalists and unionized laborers have advertised as major problems, provided we have sense enough to learn from Europe not to commit the cardinal sin of which she has been guilty. Under no circumstances must we allow population to increase faster than the internal foodsupply. Food imports must never surpass food exports as a necessary means of feeding excess people. We have seen the results of such folly across the water;* let us profit. Let us overcome that childish delusion which encourages a grandiose pride in mere bigness; happiness has a way of flying out the window when pressed by too great numbers.

* See an article entitled "Oversea Politics and the Food Supply," in SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE for January, 1924.

ginnings are lost in myth.

During the ninth century B. C. it was given an immense advertising boom by a prince of Britain, Bladud, who, after being deported from court as a leper, turned swineherd and rolled with his pigs in the mud of its springs, returned to royal society completely cured, and became the father of King Lear. Score one for Bath, first factor in the creation of one of the greatest plays ever written!

Here the Romans sought the fountain of youth and built, in A. D. 45, an enduring structure over the warm and healing waters. The fifteenth-century abbey, with its weather-worn angels forever ascending and descending ladders of crumbly sandstone, speaks of a time when townspeople gave their lives to building, and abbots planted Gothic beauty throughout England.

But Bath, despite its antiquity, persists irrevocably, delightfully Georgian. Its eighteenth-century Royal Pump-Room stands triumphant on the old Roman structure, and in the stately Georgian hall Beau Nash, noble of paunch and double of chin, with foot advanced and head thrown back, gazes benignly from his pedestal on the drinkers of a twopennyworth of warm spring water. I had not been astonished had I suddenly heard, from a corner, the voices of Doctor Johnson and Sheridan in dispute, or Garrick jibing the pair with witty flings.

The corridors around the central hall of the Pump-Room building are lined with framed engravings of eighteenth-century actors, playbills, and manuscript scores of

old operas and concertos, for Bath was a music centre and many noted composers and conductors directed its orchestra.

Beau Nash was a martinet. His formulas of social amenities for those frequenting the Pump-Room still hang upon its wall, and their strictures applied as well to the patrons of the theatre. It may be judged how much the manners of the time needed discipline when one reads some of the Beau's regulations. He was indefatigable in his insistence upon elegance of deportment and politeness.

Rule 5. That no gentleman give his ticket to the balls to any but gentlewomen. N. B.Unless he has none of his acquaintance.

Rule 6. That gentlemen crowding before ladies at the ball show ill manners, and that none do so for the future-except such as respect nobody but themselves.

Rule 7. That no gentleman or lady take it ill that another dances before them-except such as have no pretense to dance at all. Rule 9. That the young ladies take notice how many eyes observe them. N. B.-This does not extend to the Have-at-alls.

Rule 10. That whisperers of lies and scandal be taken for their authors.

One of Nash's chief regulations was the ending of festivities at an early hour. If Bath was to thrive as a health resort, people must early to bed. At eleven o'clock he held up his hand and all music and dancing ceased upon the instant. On one occasion George II's daughter, the Princess Amelia, besought him to allow one dance more, but the Beau's rule was of iron. Amelia might be of royal blood, but he was King of Bath. While the festivities were on, however, he was the life of the party; spirits were not permitted to flag. Once, at a ball, upon overhearing a young lady decline the invitation of a gallant under the plea that "she did not chuse to dance," Nash shouted out: "G-d-n you, madam! What business have you here if you do not dance?" The affrighted miss tremblingly took her place in the minuet.