e beginning to repeat in the fertile alluvial valleys of
the interior, the tragic story of the East.

In the Mississippi valley, conditions seem better. Values of farming
lands are increasing rapidly; the farms are rich and growing richer;
food products are cheap and abundant; certain staples are produced
in enormous quantities and sent to feed the cities of the East and
the industrial population of Europe. The railroads transport these
products nearly one thousand miles for the same prices as they
charge in the East for transporting them one hundred miles. Wealth,
activity, and political power concentrate at the inlet and outlet of
the railway funnel, leaving vast areas of unused and unusable land
between the terminals. Access to markets determines value. That is
why the favored lands of Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, and
Wisconsin, one to two thousand miles from market, have risen in
value to as high as three hundred dollars per acre, and the lands of
New England, New York, and New Jersey go begging at twenty to sixty
dollars per acre, unless they lie within the artificial prosperity
of the cities.

Farther west in the irrigated regions of Colorado and Utah,
restricted areas are held for special fruit crops, at prices ranging
from three hundred to two thousand dollars and up, per acre. But
here, again, monopoly, now a monopoly of natural opportunity, is a
factor in creating prices; on this, however, the vast irrigation
projects of the government, bringing into use larger and larger
areas of these favored lands, were expected to exercise a check. Up
to 1918 little has been sold. Their reclamation cost too much.

The willingness of the Southern planters to sell their lands, and so
to release them for intensive cultivation, has partly turned the
tide of immigration from the Eastern ports to the South, and the
market garden system is reaching increasing areas. The development
of factories to make cotton fabrics and to utilize the formerly
wasted cotton seed by turning it into meal for cattle and other
animals, as well as into the various food products, such as
cotton-seed oil, cottolene, etc., has stimulated the use of the
waste land around these budding factory centers, thus tending to
encourage intensive use of small, well-located tracts.

With a climate much milder and more equable than that of the
Northern states, with a potential fertility of soil, equally great
under proper management, the South is making gr