awn-out effects of the Civil War. My fourth
division, the Far Western section, includes the ranching lands of the
arid belt with their irrigation oases, and the fruit-growing and farming
lands of the Pacific Coast.

As we are discussing the problem chiefly in its human aspect, which
affects alike communities wealthy and impoverished, large and small,
old-settled and newly established, it will not matter essentially where
we first direct our attention for the purpose of illustration. But if,
as I hold, nothing less than a reconstruction of rural civilisation is
called for, our inquiries will be more profitably directed to those
sections where agricultural society is permanently established, or where
the rural population might abandon the migratory habit if the conditions
were more favorable to an advanced civilisation. At the present stage I
feel that the whole subject can be most profitably discussed in its
application to the Middle Western and the Southern sections. Here the
intimate relationship of the Conservation and the Country Life ideas is
best illustrated. Here, too, we get into touch with the problem at its
two extremes of prosperity and poverty, each in its own way retarding
the progress of rural civilisation. In both sections the conditions are
typical, and distinctively American.

Let us then consider first the general course of rural civilisation in
the great food-producing tract of the Middle West. I have in my mind the
portion I know best, the last-settled part of the corn belt. Thirty
years ago I saw something of the newcomers who settled in this section,
where there was still much raw land. These settlers, knowing that the
land must rise rapidly in value, almost invariably purchased much larger
farms than they could handle. They often sank their available working
capital in making the first payments for their land, and went heavily
into debt for the balance. They became "land poor," and, in order to
meet the instalments of purchase and the high interest on their
mortgages, they invented a system of farming unprecedented in its
wastefulness. The farm was treated as a mine, or, to use Mr. James J.
Hill's metaphor, as a bank where the depositors are always taking out
more than they put in. A corn crop, year after year, without rotation or
fertilisers, satisfied the new conception of husbandry--the easiest and
least costly extraction of the wealth in the soil. Land, labour,
capital, and ability I had been