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formation, is certainly warranted by recent experiences. Thus, if the trade between the United Kingdom alone and the leading countries of the East, exclusive of India, continues to increase in the next quarter of a century in the same ratio as it has during the last quarter, when commercial facilities were much less than at present, its aggregate value of $190,000,000 in 1860, and $440,000,000 in 1885, will swell to $1,038,000,000 in the year 1910; and, beyond that date, to an amount that must be left to the imagination.

That the only possible future for agriculture, prosecuted for the sake of producing the great staples of food, is to be found in large farms, worked with ample capital, especially in the form of machinery, and with labor organized somewhat after the factory system, is coming to be the opinion of many of the best authorities, both in the United States and Europe. And as a further part of such a system, it is claimed that the farm must be devoted to a specialty, or a few specialties, on the ground that it would be almost as fatal to success to admit mixed farming, as it would be to attempt the production of several kinds of manufactures under one roof and establishment.

Machinery is already largely employed in connection with the drying and canning of fruit and vegetables, and in the manufacture of wine. In the sowing, harvesting, transporting, and milling of wheat, the utilization has reached a point where further improvement would seem to be almost impossible. In the business of slaughtering cattle and hogs, and rendering their resulting products available for food and other useful purposes, the various processes, involving large expenditure and great diversity of labor, especially in "curing," succeed each other with startling rapidity, and are, or can be, all carried on under one roof; and on such a scale of magnitude and with such a degree of economy, that it is said that, if the entire profits of the great slaughtering establishments were limited to the gross receipts from the sale of the beef-tongues in the one case and the pigs' feet in the other, the returns on the capital invested and the business transacted would be eminently satisfactory. It is not, however, so well known that the business of fattening cattle by the so called "factory system," on a most extensive scale, has also been successfuly introduced in the Northwestern and transMississippi States and Territories, and that great firms have at present thousands of cattle gathered under one roof, and undergoing the operation of fattening by the most continuous, effective, and economic processes. The results show that one laborer can take care of two hundred steers undergoing the process of grainfeeding for the shambles, in a systematic, thorough manner, with the expenditure of much less time and labor per day than the

ordinary farmer spends in tending fifteen or twenty head of fattening steers under the disadvantages existing upon ordinary farms. In these mammoth establishments "a steam-engine moves the hay from one large barn to another, as needed, by means of an endless belt, and supplies it to a powerful machine, where it is cut into lengths suitable for feeding, and afterward carries the cut hay by other belts to the mixing-room, where by means of another machine it is mixed with corn-meal; the corn having been previously shelled and then ground on the premises by power from the same engine. Again, the mixed feed is carried automatically to the feed-boxes in the stalls. The same engine pumps the water for drinking, which runs in a long, shallow trough within reach of the steers; and even the stalls are cleaned by water discharged through a hose, the supply being raised by the engine and stored for use. The steers are not removed from the stalls in which they are placed from the time the fattening process is begun until they are ready for transportation to the big establishments above mentioned for systematic slaughtering. The advantages of such establishments are not, moreover, confined to labor-saving expedients merely. The uniformity of temperature secured through all kinds of weather is equivalent to a notable saving of feed; for where fluctuations of temperature are extreme and rapid, and not guarded against, "a great deal of the grain which the farmer feeds is 'blown away' after having been consumed by his stock," in form of vital heat, strength, and growth, which are the products of the conversion of the grain on digestion.*

* It has been found that the present usual method adopted on Western farms of feeding grain, especially corn, without previous grinding, is most costly, as the grain in its natural condition is imperfectly digested. Another scrious objection to the imperfect methods of the ordinary farm in grain-feeding is, that the grain is fed in a too con. centrated form; the fact being unknown, or disregarded, that the thrift of the fattening animal depends largely on the intimate admixture of ground grain with coarse forage; and that hay, alsó, must be chopped, and more thoroughly intermingled with it, for the attainment of the best results. But the chopping of the hay and straw and the mixing with meal and water is a laborious operation, and hence the economy of applying the steam-engine, and thus saving labor in the business of feeding. Another saving is in building materials; the larger the structure in which the machinery, the hay and grain, and the animals are kept, the less the proportionate quantity of lumber needed; and then, again, in such an establishment, temperature and ventilation, which in ordinary farming are matters that receive little attention, are economically and effectively regulated. An American practical farmer, the owner and manager of seven thousand acres (Mr. II. H—, of Nebraska), to whom the writer is indebted for many items of information, communicates the following additional review of this subject from the American (Western) stand-point: "The average Western farm is now recklessly managed, but capital will come in greater volume and set up processes which will displace these wasteful methods. The revolution is certain, even if the exact steps can not now be precisely indicated. At present the hay, and much of the grain, and nearly all of the tools and implements, are unsheltered; and more than fifty per cent of the hay is ruined for a like reason, while

How great a revolution in the business of agriculture is yet to be effected by the cultivation of land in large tracts, with the full use of machinery and under the factory system, is matter for the future to reveal; but it can not be doubted that the shiftless, wasteful methods of agriculture, now in practice over enormous areas of the earth's surface, are altogether too barbarous to be much longer tolerated; and, as the result of such progress, the return of the prices of meats and cereals to their former higher rates, which many are anticipating on account of the increasing number of the world's consumers, may be delayed indefinitely. Possibly in the not very remote future, the world -as its population shows no signs of abatement in its increase— may be confronted with a full occupation of all farming land and a great comparative diminution of product through an exhaustion of its elements of fertility; but, before that time arrives, improvements may possibly be made in agriculture which will have practically the same effect as an increase in the quantity of land; or possibly chemistry may be able to produce food by the direct combination of its inorganic elements.

Finally, a comprehensive review of the economic changes of the last quarter of a century, and a careful balancing of what seems to have been good and what seems to have been evil in respect to results, would seem to warrant the following conclusions: That the immense material progress that these changes have entailed has been for mankind in general, movement upward, and not downward; for the better and not for the worse; and that the epoch of time under consideration will hereafter rank in history as one that has had no parallel, but which corresponds in importance with the periods that successively followed the Crusades, the invention of gunpowder, the emancipation of thought through the Reformation, and the invention of the steam-engine; when the whole plane of civilization and the animals themselves (I do not mean now on the wild-stock ranges, but even on the trans-Missouri farms) have no roof over their heads, except the canopy of heaven, with the mercury going occasionally twenty and even thirty degrees below zero. These wasteful methods in farming are in part promoted by the United States homestead law, and the occupation of the hitherto inexhaustible expanse of cheap lands. When the ignorant, degraded, and impecunious can no longer acquire a hundred and sixty acres upon which to employ their barbarous methods, and when the land already taken up shall have risen from the low prices at which it now stands to fifty dollars or more per acre, a new dispensation will arrive. Neither the cattle, nor the food which the cattle consume, will then be raised by any such methods as now prevail; neither will they be exposed to the elements in winter. True enough, the opening up of other virgin fields in Australia, South America, Africa, and elsewhere, may retard this rise in the value of the land in the western part of our continent, and thus to a certain extent delay the passing of the land exclusively into the hands of larger capitalists and better managers; but it must be considered that not all climates are suitable for energetic, capable farming populations, and likewise that the best forage plants are restricted to temperate latitudes."

humanity rose to a higher level; each great movement being accompanied by social disturbances of great magnitude and serious import, but which experience proved were but temporary in their nature and infinitesimal in their influence for evil in comparison with the good that followed. And what the watchman standing on this higher eminence can now see is, that the time has come when the population of the world commands the means of a comfortable subsistence in a greater degree and with less of effort than ever before; and what he may reasonably expect to see at no very remote period is, the dawn of a day when human poverty will mean more distinctly than ever physical disability, mental incapacity, or unpardonable viciousness or laziness.

THE MORAL INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE.
BY FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D.

PHILOSOPHIC advocate of religious tolerance holds that "the most effective way to explode a popular fallacy is to explain it." If we should apply that method to the exorcism of the mediæval specters that still haunt the by-ways of the nineteenth century, we might say that the moral aberrations of the middle ages sprang chiefly from the tendency to underrate the moral effects of physical causes. If the chronic despondency of a mediæval dyspeptic reached the phase of suicidal temptations, his confessor would advise him to defeat the wiles of the arch-fiend by devoting his leisure to the recitation of a few thousand paternosters. If peppered hash and want of exercise had vitiated the temper of his wife to an unbearable degree, he was instructed to consider the visitation a judgment incurred by his unbelief, or by his opposition to an extra assessment of the tithe-collector. The epidemic increase of the alcohol-habit was persistently treated as a disorder amenable to the influence of prayer-meetings. For nearly a thousand years the history of European morals was, indeed, the history of the efforts and failures of visionaries who hoped to reconcile the promotion of ethical reform with a total neglect of physiological studies.

Since the revival of naturalism, however, the tendencies of educational reform make it probable that the progress of moral philosophy will become identified with the development of a new science, thus far only outlined in a few incidental treatises on the interaction of body and mind. The possibilities of that science are suggestively indicated by the results of the statistical studies devoted to one of its branches-the moral influence

of climate. Modern French scientists are nothing if not methodical, and have repeatedly called attention to the curious regularity in the geographical distribution of certain vices and virtues: intemperance, for instance, north of the forty-eighth parallel; sexual aberrations south of the forty-fifth; financial extravagance in large seaport towns; thrift in pastoral highland regions. It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that in the home of the best wine-grapes, in Greece and southern Spain, drunkenness is far less prevalent than in Scotland, or in Russian Poland, where Bacchus can tempt his votaries only with nauseous vodka. The idea that a low temperature begets an instinctive craving for alcoholic tonics seems disproved by the teetotalism of the Patagonian savages, who horsewhip every Spanish stimulant-monger without benefit of clergy. The Lesghian mountaineers, too, observe the interdict of the Koran in the icy summit-regions of the Caucasus; but there is no doubt that the bracing influence of a cold climate affords a certain degree of immunity from the debilitating effect of the alcohol-vice, and that a Scandinavian peasant can for years survive the effects of a daily dose of alcohol that would kill an Egyptian fellah in a single month. But it is equally certain that the temperance of south-land nations is considerably facilitated by the abundance of non-alcoholic pastimes. The Spaniards have their fandangos and bull-fights; the Greeks their border-raids, cocking-mains, and horse-races; while the Scotchman, after six days of hard work, is confronted with the choice between the delirium of an alcohol-fever and the appalling tedium of sabbatarian asceticism, and naturally chooses the less dismal alternative.

The question, though, remains, if religious gloom itself is not an outcome of climatic influences. Cardinal de Retz, indeed, held that orthodox loyalty is a flower that can not flourish north of the Alps; but it is more than probable that the survival of that plant has been greatly assisted by the conniving bonhomie of south European ecclesiastics, who, centuries ago, began to appreciate the wisdom of extending the practice of renunciation to the claim of consistency. The "climate of superstition" can not be defined by geographical specifications; but, as the gilded clouds of the South float grizzly over the moping firmament of the North, dogmas which the inhabitants of the lower latitudes manage to reconcile with a good deal of secular beatitude are apt to assume a gloomy character in the land of the hyperboreans, whose rational rigorism, however, may recalcitrate against self-contradictory tenets, and accept a thoroughly uncomfortable more readily than an illogical doctrine. Thus we find the Nahagathas, the Protestants of Buddhism, confined to Japan and northern China, and the schismatic Shiites to the

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