of a new one.  The restorative process may be complete by the time we have four hundred souls to the square mile, like England and Flanders.  Meanwhile, the exporting of Iowa and California in the shape of wheat is going on at what must be esteemed a profitable rate; for our farmers, as a class, do not seem to be losing ground.  Their glebes have risen in value from thirty-two hundred millions in 1850 to sixty-six hundred ten years later, and ninety-three hundred in 1870.  This has been accompanied by a diminution of their average extent, the farm of 1870 covering a hundred and fifty-three acres.  This is small enough, considering the capital necessary for stock in these days of improved and costly implements, when a farmer can no longer pack his entire kit in a cart.  It matches closely the size of English holdings, where agricultural science is at its height.  The French peasant-farmers, with their plats of three and four acres, are chained to the spade and hoe, and their steading becomes a poultry-yard—­a consummation we are not yet in sight of, as is proved by the legions of pigs and beeves, barreled or bellowing, that roll in from the ancient realms of Pontiac and the Prophet with a smoothness and velocity unattained by the most luxurious coach that carried a First Congressman.

Everything that makes a nation, we are told, and the nation itself, is the product of the soil.  But the less immediate, finer and most delicate fruits cannot usually be garnered until the soil is thoroughly subdued.  The mass of matter keeps the intellectual in abeyance.  Were Europe enlarged one-half, and her population reduced to one-eighth what it actually is, the spectacle of culture she now presents would be an impossibility.  It is our merit that, thus brought to American conditions, she would in no way compare with American achievement.  An offset wherewith we must at the same time be debited is the aid we have, in so many forms, derived from her.  Making every allowance for this, it is a clear credit in our favor that one-tenth of Christendom should have done so much more than a tenth of its effective thinking simultaneously with taming the most savage half of its domain.  We have more than our share of laborers in the mental vineyard, though fewer of them are master-workmen.  We utilize for Europe herself, and send back to her in its first available shape, much of what her students produce.  As between thought and substance, the two continents interchange offices.  We import the crude material her philosophers harvest or mine, work it up and return it, just as she takes the yield of our non-metaphorical fields and strata and restores it manufactured.  Much of the social, political and industrial advancement of Europe within the century she may be said to owe to the United States.  Her governmental reforms certainly and confessedly found here their germ.  These gave birth to others of a social character.  In this manner, as well as more directly by our commerce, inventions and example, we have stimulated her industry.  We have spread before her the two oceans, and taught her to traverse them with a firm and masterful mien, no longer