The most interesting change of which the Census gives account is the increase in the number of farms. The number has virtually doubled within twenty years. The population of the country has not increased in like proportion. A large part of the increase in number of farms has been due to the division of great estates. Nor has this occurred, as some may imagine, exclusively in the Southern States and the States to which immigration and migration have recently been directed. It is an important fact that the multiplication of farms has continued even in the older Northern States, though the change has not been as great in these as in States of the far West or the South. In New York there has been an increase of 25,000, or 11.5 per cent, in the number of farms since 1870; in New Jersey the increase has been 12.2 per cent., and in Pennsylvania 22.7 per cent., though the increase in population, and doubtless in the number of persons engaged in farming, has been much smaller. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois also, have been considered fully settled States for years, at least in an agricultural point of view, and yet the number of farms has increased 26.1 per cent, in ten years in Ohio, 20.3 percent, in Indiana, and 26.1 per cent, in Illinois. The obvious explanation is that the growth of many cities and towns has created a market for a far greater supply of those products which may be most advantageously grown upon farms of moderate size; but even if this fully accounts for the phenomenon, the change must be recognized as one of the highest importance industrially, socially, and politically. The man who owns or rents and cultivates a farm stands on a very different footing from the laborer who works for wages. It is not a small matter that, in these six States alone, there are 205,000 more owners or managers of farms than there were only a decade ago. As we go further toward the border, west or north, the influence of the settlement of new land is more distinctly felt. Even in Michigan, where new railroads have opened new regions to settlement, the increase in number of farms has been over 55 per cent. In Wisconsin, though the increase in railroad mileage has been about the same as in Michigan, the reported increase in number of farms has been only 28 per cent., but in Iowa it rises to 60 per cent., and in Minnesota to nearly 100 per cent. In Kansas the number of farms is 138,561, against 38,202 in 1870; in Nebraska 63,387, against 12,301; and in Dakota 17,435, against 1,720. In these regions the process is one of creation of new States rather than a change in the social and industrial condition of the population.