What, according to the _Standard_, is the profit to be drawn from this square league? It will fatten some 4500 head of three-year-old cattle, which may be bought at £4, 8s. per head, and seven months later sold at £7, 18s. 6d.; this will give a profit of £3, 10s. 6d. per head, or a gross profit of £15,862. Deducting £7040[59] for expenses (allowing freight to the extent of 10s. 6d. per head), there remains a net profit of £8800 per league per annum, or 100 per cent. on the outlay. If such are the results to be obtained from the transformation of an uncultivated tract of land into a lucerne pasture, it is not surprising that rural property is so quickly attaining so high a value. [Footnote 59: Apparently made up of half the cost of the lucerne pasture, plus freight and labour; as two sets of beasts can be fattened in a year or a little over.——[TRANS.]] In the case of quebracho——a very hard wood which is useful for building and constructive purposes, and from which an excellent tannin can be obtained——matters are much the same. Having had experience of the large profits to be derived from the manufacture of quebracho extract, and the splendid dividends paid by the companies engaged in the work, men or business, anxious to invest their capital to advantage, hastened to acquire forests of quebracho, with the result that the price of such land suddenly rose to a level hitherto undreamed of. Tracts situated in the Chaco——a region where quebracho abounds——which were selling a year previously for £88 the square league of 9648 square miles, rose in price to £880, and this latter price can by no means be considered as a definite maximum. What is true of lucerne and quebracho is also, though on a much smaller scale, true of linseed or wheat, when after an abundant harvest the land-owner or farmer procures the requisite capital for the purchase of the land he has been cultivating and pays a good price for it. There are here elements which confound all calculations made in advance, and make it difficult to fix even an approximate value on the soil. At the present moment there is no basis for such a valuation. A farm selling to-day at 20s. per acre, may to-morrow sell for 26s., the day after to-morrow for 32s., and so on, until prices are reached which astonish the first vendor, and give him the melancholy conviction that he did ill to part with his land. For this reason, the best thing one can do to-day is to hold on to the land. The value of rural and urban property has gone on increasing more and more rapidly for more than forty years; and although there have been great fluctuations in prices, the rise has always been constant in the long run; owing to the increase in the population, the consolidation of political institutions, the construction of far-reaching railway systems, the prodigious development of international traffic, and, as a natural consequence, the great increase of public wealth.