anubian States, Hungary,
Turkey, etc. A climate of surpassing quality, a soil so luxuriant and
fertile as is hardly found in the best regions of the United States,
will some day furnish an abundance of food to unnumbered people. The
decrepit political and social conditions of those countries cause
hundreds of thousands of our own people to prefer crossing the ocean
rather than to settle in those much nearer and more comfortably located
States. Soon as rational social conditions and international relations
will prevail there, new millions of people will be needed to raise those
large and fertile lands to a higher grade of civilization.

In order to be able to reach materially higher rungs on the ladder of
civilization we shall, for a long time to come, have in Europe, not a
superfluity, but a dearth of people. Under such circumstances, it is an
absurdity to yield to the fear of over-population. It must ever be kept
in mind that the utilization of existing sources of food, by the
application of science and labor, knows no limit: every day brings new
discoveries and inventions which increase the yield of the sources of
food.

If we pass from Europe to the other parts of the earth, the lack of
people and the excess of soil is still more glaring. The most luxuriant
and fruitful lands of the earth still lie wholly or almost wholly idle:
the work of bringing them under cultivation and turning them to use can
not be undertaken with a few hundred or thousand people: it demands mass
colonizations of many millions in order to be able to bring the
but-too-luxuriant Nature under human control. Under this head belong,
among others, Central and South America--a territory of hundreds of
thousands of square miles. Argentina, for instance, had in 1892 about
5,000,000 hectares under cultivation, the country has, however,
96,000,000 hectares at its disposal. The soil of South America, fit for
the cultivation of corn and lying fallow, is estimated at 200,000,000
hectares, at least. The United States, Austria-Hungary, Great Britain
and Ireland, Germany and France have all together only about 105,000,000
hectares devoted to cereals. Carey maintains that the 360-mile long
valley of the Orinoco alone could furnish enough food to supply the
whole present human race. Let us halve the estimate, and there is still
an abundance. At any rate, South America alone could feed the majority
of the population now extant on earth. The nutritive value of a