0 bushels and Minnesota 188,000,000 bushels. In
round numbers we support 90,000,000 people on 3,000,000 square miles
of land, and we could support 150 per square mile just as easily as
30, and even then there would be not even a fraction of the density of
population of Denmark, 178; the Netherlands, 470; France, 189; Saxony,
830; England and Wales, 405.6. The average wheat yield of our country
is about 14 bushels per acre in good years, it might just as well be
25; the average cotton yield is about four-tenths of a bale per acre,
and four times that amount could be raised as easily.

In 1900, 10,500,000 people were engaged in agriculture in America, or
35.7 per cent. of the population; as over against 37.7 in 1890 and
44.3 in 1880. Of these 10,500,000, 5,700,000 were owners, renters, or
overseers, or 56 per cent., and only 4,500,000 were actual farm
laborers; and more than half of these, or 2,350,000, were members of
the family, leaving only some 2,000,000 actual agricultural wage-earners,
or employable agricultural laborers. Five-eighths of these
were under twenty-five years of age, and of the white regular workers
only one-tenth were over thirty-five years of age. This shows how
unstable is the foundation of our agricultural prosperity, the chief
asset of plenty and contentment of our country. Mr. Get-Rich-Quick has
moved on to the shifting and more exciting opportunities of the
cities, where poor human nature, aided and abetted by weak
philanthropy, and demagogic fishing for votes by eleemosynary
legislation, provides him with a mild form of riotous living, and a
fatted calf of doles in case of accident, sickness, penury, or old
age.

In our American cities of over 8,000 inhabitants the increase in
population from 1790 to 1900 has been from 3.4 per cent. to 33 per
cent. In cities of 2,500 and over the increase from 1880 to 1900 has
been from 29.3 per cent. to 40.2 per cent. In the State of New York
the farming population is smaller than ever before, and in parts of
New England it is smaller than one hundred years ago. In 1909 there
were 15,000 deserted farms with a total of 1,130,000 acres. The
average size of farms in the United States in 1850 was 212 acres; in
1890, 121 acres. Wages in the reaping season on fruit, grain, and
cotton farms are enormous, running to four and five dollars a day. We
are behind every country in Europe except Russia, in our agricultural
methods. Some day the American people will discover