A CENTURY ago, in 1790, there were in this country many more people living in the country than in the towns. A town is any collection of houses containing in one group 8,000 people. Now, during the century the entire population has increased sixteen times and the town population has increased 160 times. The town population grows faster than the average rate of the whole population. This increase of town residents has been chiefly since 1850, and the rate of the increase is more and more rapid. In 1850 we had 85 cities of an average of 35,000 inhabitants. In 1860 we had 141, and in 1870, 226 cities. In 1880 we had 286 cities, and the average population had risen to nearly 40,000. This year a new census is to be taken, and we may confidently look forward to still more cities and a still higher average population. A hundred years ago one-thirtieth of the people lived in towns; in 1860 one-sixth, and in 1870 one-fourth of our people were town-dwellers. Many people have looked upon this wonderful growth of city population with alarm. They view with regret the continual emigration of the young people from the arm to the factory and shop. We hear much of the decay of farms and of the rapid decline of the whole business of raising food from the ground.

We sit in our little gardens and wonder why the farm does not pay better. Would it not be wise to look over the fence, or tear the old thing down and look out over the fields to see what all this means, and what it portends for the future gardens of America ?

If more people live in towns than a hundred or even twenty years ago, clearly there are more people to be fed in proportion to those who produce the food. What is a garden for ? Why does anybody work on a farm ? To produce food. With the exception of fish, all the food in the world comes from the garden. (The word garden may be used to include the farm, plantation and orchard.) If at one time one person in thirty depended on the other twenty-nine for food, to-day every fourth person depends on the other three to feed him from day to day. One thing more. The entire population of the world is, at all times, within ten months of universal starvation. Within two years the. entire people would be absolutely without means of clothing themselves. The garden is our only means of warding off the complete extinction of the race. The cities would perish of cold and hunger in short order if every one should retire from the work of the garden. It is, practically, far more serious than this, because great cities like New York do not and cannot store food in any great quantities. This was painfully illustrated at the time of the blizzard two years ago.

New York absolutely leans on the garden, and is kept alive from hand to mouth, day by day, by the products of the land.

This first glance over the fence shows us a great and immensely important field of study. How happens it that with this enormous increase of the number of food-eaters that the business of making food is so unprofitable ? Is it really true that the garden does not pay ? Food is certainly cheaper than ever before. Common cotton cloth was twenty-five cents a yard not so very long ago. It is six cents to-day, and yet the operators in a cotton mill to-day earn more wages and cotton mills pay bigger dividends. Perhaps if we look at this matter of cotton cloth we may get a hint that will help us. When sheetings were high, workmen in the mills received low wages and produced only a few yards in a day. The owner of. the mill paid a high price for his machinery, and had to be content with small dividends. To-day sheetings are low, wages are high, and yet machinery, by reason of its higher speed, really produces more cloth and pays a larger dividend. The interest on the plant is lower, and yet the profits are greater. It is not true that machinery makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Machinery enables the poor to earn more for less labor and to buy sheetings cheaper, while the mill owner, paying less interest, earns less per yard of cloth made and more per dollar invested in machinery.

Is there not here a hint for the garden ? Food is undoubtedly cheaper than a hundred or even twenty years ago. It takes less labor to earn a barrel of flour than ever before. Millions of our people have to-day a better bill of fare on their tables than even the rich had a hundred years ago. Our city working-people would not and could not go to the drcary and monotonous dinner table of the farmer of fifty years ago. Fruit is for sale on every street corner. Pifty years ago it was a luxury only for the well-to-do. We may thank the Italian for teaching us the value of cheap fruit stands. The canning and preserving of food has cheapened the cost of living and made a market for enormous quantities of fruits and vegetables. There is the sewing machine. It has made it easy to have a great variety of clothing, and as a result we wear more clothes than did our fathers, and this means millions of dollars poured out on our cotton fields.

In all manufactures we see a steady concentration of capital and labor. The shoe shop has absorbed the little shoemakers. At one time the fishermen on the New England coast had, every man, a little shed or room set off from his house where he made shoes in the winter by hand. If we depended to-day entirely on hand-made shoes we would soon be a bare-foot nation. On the other hand, in this immense business of raising food we cling to the old hand methods. It may be a question whether the complaint of the poor profits of gardening may not spring from the very fact that we raise food too much by hand. Wheat is raised in the northwest on the factory principle. It is manufactured food, and the great wheat-producing places are not farms, but factories employing land instead of shops. How is it possible for one man in New York state with two horses and a day laborer to compete with a wheat factory ? He cannot, and the sooner we look squarely over the garden fence and see things as they are, the better for all concerned.

The gardens are here. We live on them and by them. The thing to do is to change our methods. If we cannot raise wheat we must do something else. Every fourth person in the country looks to us for his daily food. He is better able to pay than ever before, but it is not to be expected that he will pay the old prices. We must make food cheap. The city workman is in a shop built on capital that pays two and a half per cent. How can we feed him and pay six per cent. on the value of our land ?

Those things suggest many serious problems to the American gardener. Our first glance over the fence shows us not the gloomy outlook we had thought, but everything to encourage. More and more people to be fed every year. Less and less people in the business of raising food. Actual lower prices for garden products and a thousand times more food wanted. Cities not only devour enormous quantities of food, but the eaters are growing wonderfully critical. They want variety, they want things out of season and they want the luxuries. Lettuce is on more dinner tables to-day than fifty years ago, and somewhere there must be hundreds of acres devoted to lettuce that was then woodland or pasture.

This glance over the fence shows so many things to study and examine that it may be well to look wider afield, to try and see where our gardens are drifting to, and to try and guide them back to the prosperity they are said once to have had. The American Garden aims to help in all wise and proper ways. It certainly aims to tell the truth, and to call a spade a spade. It hopes to look over the fence again to talk with merchants, planters, farmers, storekeepers, railroad men, bankers and statesmen to see what they say of the future of this immense question of feeding the people. Perhaps from these wide out-looks over the country we may find something of benefit to every man and women who has a farm, plantation, orchard or garden.

Charles Barnard.