Part 11 (2/2)
Though the crops in the latter year were far higher in value, the increase in the quant.i.ty of product was only 10 per cent., as compared with an increase in population of 21 per cent.[8] Had the American people consumed all the American product in both years, they would have been obliged to cut down their ration by about one-tenth;[9] instead there was a vast diminution of exports. The growing population began to consume the agricultural products formerly exported. The question is therefore pertinent whether it will be possible for us indefinitely to feed from our own fields our increasing millions or whether we shall be forced to depend increasingly for food on outside sources and to secure this food by a development of our export trade in manufactured products. To many this question will seem to answer itself. It is commonly a.s.sumed that there are almost no limits to {178} our possible agricultural production and therefore to our desirable increase of population. France is almost self-sufficing with a population of 189.5 to the square mile; when the United States (continental area) has an equally dense population we may maintain a population of five or six hundred millions. We need merely take up new lands and cultivate more intensively.
The opportunities for the further development of American agriculture, however, while undoubtedly great, are not immeasurable. At present we have some 879,000,000 acres in farms, of which 478,000,000 (or 25.1 per cent. of our total land area) are improved.[10] But of the rest of our area much is not useful. Some 465,000,000 acres in the western part of the country have an annual precipitation of fifteen inches or less, and of these acres, not over 30,000,000 could be profitably irrigated at present prices of farm products, labour, land and capital. This addition of 30,000,000 acres would increase our present improved area by less than seven per cent. Besides the permanently arid acres, moreover, there is other unusable land in national forests, roads, cities and in swamps and over-flow lands difficult to reclaim. With these deductions made, we have only 1,252,000,000 acres as the maximum farm area of the future. This is 31.1 per cent. greater than the present farm area.[11]
It is true that a larger part of the farm area can be cultivated. From 1900 to 1910 the area of improved lands increased 15.4 per cent. If this rate of increase could continue there would be about one billion acres improved by 1960, and this seems to be the absolutely {179} outside upper limit. But this does not mean that a billion acres could be improved and cultivated at the same cost per acre as at present.
The improved lands would require a constantly increasing amount of capital and labour to secure returns equal to those which the farmer now obtains.
Similarly there are limits to the extent to which we can afford to divide up our land into smaller farms in order to secure a larger production per acre. Intensive cultivation is an alluring phrase but in the production of many staple crops intensive cultivation is dear cultivation. The movement in progressive agricultural communities is towards a moderately large farm. It is the smaller farms (of from 20 to 99 acres) that the boys and girls leave most rapidly. ”The farm management studies,” writes Mr. Eugene Merritt of the U. S. Department of Agriculture[12] ”indicate that on these small-sized farms, man labour, horse labour, and agricultural machinery cannot be used efficiently. In other words, economic compet.i.tion is eliminating the unprofitable sized farms.”[13]
{180}
The pressure of agricultural population upon a given farm area results either in the growth of an inefficient small scale production or of a large rural proletariat. Both are undesirable and neither will permit farming on as cheap a scale as at present. The actual trend to-day in districts where cereals are raised is towards larger farms (of 150 to 300 acres), and this tendency is likely to be increased by the introduction of cheap tractor engines, which now seems to impend.
There is doubtless a considerable opportunity in the United States for an improvement in the average product per acre even though the increase in the area of cultivation constantly brings in land of decreasing fertility. If in the course of forty or fifty years we can increase the area under cultivation by fifty per cent. and the product per acre by 20 per cent. we shall have an increase in product of 80 per cent., which would provide for an increase in the population of 80,000,000 without any greater leaning upon foreign resources than to-day.[14]
We are likely, however, to lean upon certain foreign resources, and more especially upon Canada and the Caribbean countries. Whatever its political allegiance Canada is and will probably remain economically a part of the United States. The Iowa farmers, who sold out their home farms to buy cheaper land in Canada, unconsciously ill.u.s.trated the closeness of this economic bond. We may draw upon Canadian wheat, fish, lumber and iron ore almost exactly as though the territory were our own. It is Canada's interest to sell to us and buy from us, and even preferential duties cannot entirely overcome our immense geographical advantage over Europe. Similarly {181} we shall draw upon the Caribbean countries, whether or not we have a political union, for vast quant.i.ties of tropical food stuffs.
Whatever our importation of food an increase in agricultural efficiency is also probable. We have already improved and cheapened our farm machinery and have disseminated agricultural education and information.
But much progress remains to be made. We can use better seeds, raise better crops and cattle, and work more co-operatively instead of individualistically. Our transportation system can be better co-ordinated with our agriculture, so that food, now wasted because it will not pay the freight, can be brought to market.[15] A better knowledge of the science of farming would greatly increase our agricultural production. If our country roads were improved, if we varied our crops more intelligently, if we refrained from impoveris.h.i.+ng our soils, if we drained some tracts and irrigated others, we should speedily discover a vast increase in our agricultural productiveness, a larger return to the farmers, a greater home demand for manufactured products, and a better opportunity for capital at home. {182} If by putting more capital and intelligence upon our farms, we were to add several billions to the value of their output, we should broaden the base of our whole economic life, enlarge the volume of our non-compet.i.tive exports, and in the end approximate conditions that would make for a peaceful foreign policy and for the promotion of an economic internationalism.
But though we widen our agricultural base, our population unless its rate of progress is checked, will eventually, and perhaps soon, overtake any extension.[16] Though we increase agricultural knowledge and subst.i.tute mechanical for animal power and gasoline for hay, the law of diminis.h.i.+ng returns will remain. Ten men cannot secure as large a per capita product from a given area as five, or twenty as large as ten. But if our population were to maintain its present geometrical increase we should have 200,000,000 inhabitants in 1953 and, to a.s.sume the almost impossible, 400,000,000 in 1990. Long before the latter figure could be reached there would be positive and preventive checks to further growth, but if these checks were late in being applied, there would come increased inequality, misery and economic uncertainty, and an enhanced liability to war.
For us as for other nations a too rapid increase in population spells this constant danger of war. Our farms cannot absorb more than a certain proportion of our population without causing lowered wages and increasing poverty, and we cannot expand our export trade without entering into the range of international conflict. While therefore an improved agriculture with high food prices will permit of an increase in our population, it is {183} advantageous that that increase does not proceed too rapidly. If we grow to two hundred millions in seventy-five or one hundred years instead of in thirty-seven, we shall still be strong enough to protect our present territories and shall have less occasion to fight for new.
Fortunately our rate of population increase, despite immigration, is steadily decreasing. In the decade ending 1860 our population increased 35.6 per cent., in the period 1860 to 1879 at an average decennial rate of 26.3 per cent., and in the three following decades 25.5 per cent., 20.7 per cent. and 21.1 per cent respectively. The fall in our natural increase was even greater. While the death rate has declined[17] the birth rate has fallen off even more rapidly. Our birth statistics are inadequate, but we can gain some idea of this decline by comparing the number of children under 5 years of age living at each census year with the number of women between the ages of 16 to 44 inclusive. In 1800 there were 976 children per 1,000 women in these ages; in 1830, 877; in 1860, 714; in 1890, 554; in 1910, 508.[18]
For a number of decades a continuation in this falling off in the birth rate is probable. It is rendered necessary by the fall in the death rate and possible by the fact that birth has ceased to be a mere physiological accident {184} and is coming under human control. ”The most important factor in the change,” says Dr. John Shaw Billings, ”is the deliberate and voluntary avoidance or prevention of child-bearing on the part of a steadily increasing number of married people who prefer to have but few children.”[19] The spreading of the knowledge of birth control and the increasing financial burden of children in an urbanised society composed of economically ambitious people will probably prevent our population from ever again increasing as rapidly as it did half a century ago.[20]
In the meanwhile our immigration (until the outbreak of the present war) continued to increase. In the ten years ending June 30, 1914, over ten million immigrant aliens arrived in the United States, of whom approximately seven millions remained. Nor has the high point in immigration been surely attained. The European population increases so rapidly that the excess of births over deaths is between three and four times the entire emigration. Immigration tends to flow from countries where the pressure of population is greater to countries like the United States, where the pressure is less. Unless there is restriction we may witness within the next decades a new vast increase in immigration, which will result in a rapid growth of our population and a resulting pressure upon our agricultural (and other natural) resources, that will vastly increase the intensity and bitterness of our {185} compet.i.tion for the world's markets and the world's investment opportunities.
By thus increasing our agricultural product, and developing our home market and our less directly compet.i.tive industries and by slackening an increase in our population, which would otherwise force us into foreign adventures, we tend to approach a balanced economic system and a parallel growth of extractive and manufacturing industries. Such a dependence in the main on home resources for the nation's primal needs is in the circ.u.mstances the best preventive of an imperialistic policy that might lead to war. But there is an even closer-lying incentive to imperialism and war. A nation may have a sufficiently wide base and an efficient industrial development but because of internal economic mal-adjustments may be driven into imperialistic courses. A policy not dictated by national needs may be forced upon the nation by the necessities and ambitions of its dominating cla.s.s.
[1] ”There was,” he (President Jefferson) said, ”one spot on the face of the earth so important to the United States that whoever held it was, for that very reason, naturally and forever our enemy; and that spot was New Orleans. He could not, therefore, see it transferred to France but with deep regret. The day she took possession of the city the ancient friends.h.i.+p between her and the United States ended; alliance with Great Britain became necessary, and the sentence that was to keep France below low-water mark became fixed.”--John Bach McMaster, ”History of the People of the United States,” Vol. II, p. 620.
[2] Agriculture is not essentially pacific; in various stages of historical development agricultural nations war upon each other in order to secure more land or to levy tribute of grain. The pacific tendency of our present agricultural development arises out of the needs of industrial Europe. Our agricultural progress, however, is peaceful only in so far as it increases the product of our fields; it would not be peaceful, and might be the exact reverse, if we sought to increase our acreage by, let us say, a conquest of Canada.
[3] By this is not meant that the nation should be preponderatingly agricultural, but only that where agriculture is sufficiently developed to maintain a large industrial population working for the home market the compet.i.tion for foreign markets and foreign investment fields becomes less intense.
[4] ”Agricultural pursuits” includes agriculture, forestry and animal husbandry. These figures from the United States Census, 1910, Vol. IV, p. 41, are only approximately exact, owing to almost insuperable difficulties in cla.s.sifying occupations. See Vol. IV, p. 19.
[5] Thirteenth Census of the United States, Vol. V, Agriculture, p. 51.
[6] The improved farm acreage increased 15.4 per cent., and the acreage devoted to the princ.i.p.al crops 9.9 per cent.
[7] The new lands, moreover, are not so good as the old. From 1850 to 1885 the lands brought into cultivation (Illinois, Iowa, etc.) were better than the earlier area, but since 1885 the farmers have driven forward into more arid lands further removed from transportation.
”Across the Great Plains, the farmer has pushed closer and closer to the base of the Rockies and, as he has done so, the difficulty of producing a bushel of corn or wheat has continually increased.”--King.
(Willford Isbell.) ”The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States,” New York (Macmillan), 1915: pp. 23, 24.
[8] For the comparability of the years 1909 and 1899, see Census Volume on Agriculture, p. 537.
[9] Actually 9.9 per cent.
[10] Total land area equals 1,903,289,600 acres.
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