VIMU

able fall. This year's crop was smaller in both acreage and production. Wheat production would no doubt be even worse if it had not been for the fact of the great war drive and the remarkable advance in the selling price of this cash crop. The combination, however, only forced it up temporarily and it has dropped back to almost its prewar average. In brief, the food production of this last decade has been almost stationary while the population of this country has increased approximately 14,000,000. It is true, of course, that there has been a greater diversification in crops and in food requirements, but these do not materially affect the basic facts.

There seems to be no escaping the conclusion that the larger areas of the rich, fertile, and easily tilled land of this country were mostly taken up a generation ago and that the increase in farm area in the future will be relatively slow. There will be increased acreage in the now cultivated area. There will still be small areas in which the frost hazard is great, other areas when the drought hazard is the limiting factor, and still other areas in which excessive costs of irrigation or drainage will have to be met. In all of these lands the cost of production will be higher than it has been on the lands already taken up and their utilization will for the most part be delayed until continued food shortage has forced prices above the present ratios.

Statisticians have estimated that our population at the close of this century will be more than 220,000,000 and have placed the probable time in which we shall begin to import the staple foods at from 15 to 30 or more years. Even if it should turn out to be the longer period, it is time we were considering the problem not only from the national standpoint but from its effect on agriculture.

The real situation is, however, much more critical than those estimates would indicate. The United States is to-day a food-importing Nation, measured in dollars-that is, we import more sugars, tea, coffee, spices, nuts, and tropical fruits than we export of wheat and meat. Most of these we have always imported and always will. Sugar. we can produce or not, as we choose, but the Nation is rapidly coming to a condition in which the food balance is going to be definitely against us unless it is made one of the major problems for national consideration.

That does not mean that under the stimulus of excessive buying and the combination of favorable conditions there might not again develop periodic surpluses. That is inevitable as long as the volume of production is subject to the hazardous influence of climatic conditions, pests, disease, and other factors over which a man exercises little or no control. Under conditions of alternate excesses and deficiencies, which will undoubtedly occur in the transition period, organization, standardization, and all development of more orderly methods of marketing and distribution will have even more possibilities of usefulness than under present conditions.

The problems of the immediate future, distressing as they may be, are, however, relatively simple as compared with those which will undoubtedly follow. The United States has been an excess foodproducing Nation so long that few thinkers have until recently considered the possibility of any other condition. We have come to look upon our rapid increase in population and our enormous increase in

food production as a normal condition, but a careful scrutiny of the situation will disclose an alarmingly different situation.

What does this mean to the Nation? It means a reorganization of our entire national life. It means that the farmer's interest in foreign markets will have disappeared. It means that the price of wheat in Chicago will be the price of wheat in Liverpool plus the cost of moving it from Liverpool to Chicago-where now the price in Chicago is the price in Liverpool less the cost of moving it there. It means that manufacture and industry which have been moving westward toward the source of cheap and abundant food will begin to move back toward the Atlantic seaboard if the food must come from across the water. It means even more than that. As time goes on they will move to the surplus-producing nations, where more favorable conditions for their development can be found.

What does it mean to the farmer? It means, first, higher prices for farm products, which would undoubtedly be welcomed, and for the first period beneficial, but it would inevitably result in an increased cost of living to the whole Nation, which would in turn react in raising the price of everything the farmer had to buy. As we are just passing through an experience of this kind, I feel certain that the farming population does not want a repetition.

It means more than this. It means the rising cost of living would drive the manufacturer who had to compete with the foreign worker out of business and thus destroy the home market, which is, after all, the best and safest market for the producer. If the farmers of this Nation as a body could study the conditions of the producing population of the food-importing nations of the Old World, and could note what percentage of their toilers pass their last days in the workhouse, they would want none of those conditions for America.

During this period in which we became a truly great food-exporting Nation we have grown as no other nation in history has ever grown. New York has jumped in that 100 years from a small town to the largest city in the world. Chicago, on the wave of that growth, developed in 50 years from the ashes of the fire of 1871 to the fourth city in the world. Remarkable! There is nothing like it in all history. It took London 20 centuries to reach its present growth. Chicago has become a city of nearly 3,000,000 in 50 years. Chicago grew because she is the eastern gateway of that great food-producing area, and Chicago will continue to grow just so long as she is the gateway of an excess-food area, but the minute that the United States stops producing an excess of food everything that history has given us in regard to nations indicates that she will stop that growth. The question of whether Chicago-and when I say Chicago, I mean any city in the United States-I mean the Nation-the question of whether Chicago in the next 100 years is going to be a city of 4,000,000 people or 10,000,000 depends on whether this Nation continues to be an excess-food producer or drops back to the food-importing condition of the old countries.

That we are going to become a food-importing nation unless we do something to prevent it is certain, and it is going to take a united effort. It is going to take a serious, aggressive policy with the backing of the whole American people behind it if we are to maintain our present condition. Do we want to or do we not?

There is another phase of the situation that can not be ignored. The population of the world is growing and will continue to grow. That civilized nation which offers the greatest opportunity to the young and adventurous will grow the fastest. Do we want to be the nation that attracts the young and ambitious of other countries or do we wish to see our young men and women migrating to other fields? Before the war period thousands of our most ambitious young men and women from the farming communities were crossing the border into our sister country to the northward, there to establish permanent homes and assist in the development of their adopted land. The interests of the two countries are so nearly mutual that we have not considered that movement a loss, but if the day comes that migration is beyond the waters the problem will be acute and the solution difficult.

We can only judge the future by the past, and if we will look at the history of other countries we will find that as soon as a nation passes from a surplus food-producer to an importing nation the rate of population increase is rapidly modified. If we will compare, for example, the rate of growth of the European nations during the last century we will find that the rate of increase in population has varied almost proportionately to the relative food supply; that the leading nations of Europe at the beginning of the last century, such as France, England, and Germany, had from three to six times the population of the United States; but that at the end of the century the United States had nearly doubled their average.

In fact the only country of Europe whose population increase was at all comparable to that of the United States was the one surplusfood producing country, Russia. . If we further compare the relative progress in the food-importing nations of Europe we will find that Germany, the one country which spent a large amount of money in the scientific development of agriculture and industry, increased her food supply and also increased her population, her wealth and power far more rapidly than any other country.

Gil

A national policy of development should consider every factor bearing upon our national life and our național relations with other civilizations. The history of the world has shown the transfer of leadership from nation to nation throughout the centuries. Fillan in the Political Science Quarterly traces the movement of civilization and world leadership with reference to the mean temperature of the countries concerned. There are many interesting and instructive things to be gleaned from this discussion and chart.

First, world supremacy has always been in the Northern Hemisphere. Second, it has in the 54 centuries charted been moving rather steadily toward cooler temperatures. This has undoubtedly been largely the result of the development of industry enabling the human race to thrive in regions in which primitive people without clothing or heated habitations could not have existed.

That the tendency seems to be continuing with practically the same rapidity is also significant and may possibly be correlated with an as yet unpublished factor showing that the highest production of almost any given crop in our hemisphere occurs near the northern limit of its adaptation. This chart indicates that the United States is exceptionally favorably located with reference to world leadership.

at this time shared almost equally, however, with England, France, and Germany. No great center of world leadership has ever developed in the Southern Hemisphere, and if the progress of civilization is going to be toward the colder regions, the possibility in the Southern Hemisphere is very limited because the land areas diminish rapidly in that direction. The United States possesses many natural advantages over the other nations mentioned and if she wishes she may continue to increase her preponderance in power and influence until her position of international leadership will be unquestioned. Before discussing the concrete problems of policy it might be well to consider briefly the fundamental biologic law, that there is no standing still in nature; that organized existence has only two definite stages, growth and decay. This is as true of animals and plants as it is of man, and so far as history has shown it is as true of social organizations as it is of the individual. It has also been shown that the more favorable the conditions, the longer growth may be continued and decay is retarded.

In physical stature there are pretty sharp limitations to growth. In mental development these limitations are much less rigid. The social organization probably corresponds more nearly to the mental rather than to the physical attributes of man. The great majority of men mature early mentally and from that time on gradually lose ground with the progress of the race. Others continue their development for long periods, practically indefinitely in fact, within the confines of physical limitations.

There is no reason why a nation should not continue to develop in the same way. Growth is natural and easy in the early stages and under favorable environment, but there always comes a period in which these favorable conditions are balanced by unfavorable ones and then further development must come from continued constructive effort on the part of the individuals or of the nation involved.

The United States has partly by virtue of her wonderful development in the past century and partly by the accident of the war come to hold a commanding position in the councils of the world. This was not of her seeking nor of our desire, but it is an obligation that can not be shifted at this time. Some nation will continue to dominate to a large extent in the constructive progress of the world. It is tremendously important to the world that that nation should be a democracy. America can be that nation if she continues to grow and develop. Power and influence will inevitably gravitate to some other nation if she does not. It is for this Nation as a whole to decide.

It is, however, largely for the farmers of this Nation to determine whether this shall be the Nation of progress and achievement, because national progress in the future must rest even more squarely back on the food-producing power than it has in the past. The critical period in which a determination must be made is close at hand.

If this Nation wants to go on increasing in power and influence as she has in the century past she must weigh every factor in the problem of permanent development to be presented by the speakers to follow. She must develop her forest resources, utilize her remaining land for the Nation's good, and subsidize research. She must weld their recommendations together into a constructive program of national unity and take steps to put them into immediate operation.

This conference is the most truly national representation of all phases of agriculture and its allied interests that has ever been brought together. If out of its combined wisdom in deliberation there shall come, along with measures for the relief of the present situation, a ringing declaration of faith in our national future and the outline of a policy of development founded on a self-sustaining agriculture that will make that faith secure, this convention may be as epoch making in a constructive way as the situation that called it together has been in a destructive one.

A NATIONAL FORESTRY POLICY.

By GIFFORD PINCHOT, of Pennsylvania.

I suppose before I begin to discuss this forest question it would be fair for me to justify my appearance before a body of farmers. I am a good deal like the Irishman in the old song: "My father, he died and he made me a farmer; he left me a cow and an acre of land." I have got a cow and an acre of land, and that might justify me in coming before you, but I think there is another reason. I have known a good many men who were of use to the farming community of the United States who were not dirt farmers.

Your chairman has just referred to one with whom I had a speaking acquaintance, the man who started the whole modern farm movement in the United States-Theodore Roosevelt. I had a deep affection and have still for another, although he has passed to the other side, the father of our present Secretary of Agriculture, Uncle Henry Wallace, and even Tama Jim Wilson. The greatest of the predecessors of our present Secretary was not acting as a dirt farmer when he rendered his tremendous service to the farm people of the United States. And for that matter there is a group of men up here on the hill, mostly not farmers, who have earned the everlasting gratitude of every farmer in the United States and of everybody else, too, because who helps the farmer helps all the people.

Now, the farmer as a class is the greatest user of wood in our country. Half of all the timber that is consumed in the United States is consumed on the farm, and you can not farm without wood. We seldom stop to think how completely the use of wood is necessary to every industry, and especially to the farmer. The farm buildings in the United States are worth $11,500,000, and nearly all of them are wood, and at every point the farmer must have wood to do his business. No wood on the farm, no food in the towns!

One of the two or three essential requirements for the conduct of the food producing industry and the clothes producing industry in the United States is plenty of wood. The further you follow this question down, the more you find that our civilization is absolutely dependent on wood. You can not eat a meal and never have that did not require wood for its production. You can not wear an article of clothing and never have that did not require wood for its production. There never was a concrete or a brick house or steel office building that could have been constructed or was constructed without the help of the forest.