The nation at large feels that it is immensely prosperous. We are cutting a wide swath; there is no doubt of it. But if we will get down closer and examine what we are doing, we will find that we are living profligately and squandering our heritage in every possible manner.
We should insist upon better cultivation of the land. For on that one item depends your future growth and prosperity, and there is no other item to which you can look; no other source of wealth than that which comes out of the cultivation of the soil.
If the soil is protected, if it is intelligently handled, if your crops are properly rotated, if the land is fertilized and rested and treated with proper care, you have a mine in the soil that will never be exhausted; quite unlike the other mine.
The millions and hundreds of millions of dollars coming into the Northwest from the annual crops, while it is large, isn't half as large as it ought to be.
Our Free Lands Are Gone.
Our public domain is exhausted. Last year over a million people came from across the Atlantic to the United States, and the natural increase certainly is a million and a half more. What is to become of these people? They are to be driven fairly into the factories and workshops and no place else.
They can leave our country and go to the Canadian Northwest, as many have gone. But that country will be populated to its extent very soon, much sooner than you think. It has not an unlimited area.
Try and cast your mind twenty or twenty-five years ahead. At that time we should have one hundred and fifty or one hundred and sixty millions of people. Where are they going? Who is going to feed them? They can manufacture. We have the raw material. We have the coal and the iron and the copper and the lead. They can manufacture. Who will buy it?
We have got to a point where we are selling our heritage; we are selling our rich deposits of iron and our coal and our rich soil, and exhausting it as well.
People of other countries are exercising the utmost, closest intelligence in everything that pertains to economy in production. Take, for instance, the German nation to-day, and they lead the world or any period in the history of the world in industrial intelligence and industrial management.