You cannot fail to have observed, that to this period your money class has had but little to do with land in your agricultural districts, except to buy and sell it. Capital, other than that limited quantity which has been created on the land, has not thus far been led into the business of its cultivation, because from the abundance and easy acquirement of land it must come, in so doing, in such direct competition with labor as not to leave a satisfactory margin of profit. When, however, your public lands shall have been all conveyed to private hands, at which time the price of land products will not be governed as now by the willingness of labor to make out of their production a mere exchange for fair wages, then, and not till then, will you find capital embarking to any great extent into the business of agriculture. When this time arrives, a change in your economy will gradually take place. The relations held by labor with capital, which have heretofore been so modified by the easier conditions of the former, with its abundance of free soil to absorb its surplus, will be driven back to its old state of greater dependence. It will no longer experience the great advantage it has held so long in its partnership with the fertile earth. Its depression will reduce the earnings of innumerable monopoly schemes, and the speculative opportunities of capital in the former rapid rise of land values will be reduced to a minimum. The acquirement of land for use and cultivation will then become one of the most promising investments for capital extant. There will be a rise in the price of food staples, and rent for the first time in your history will enter into them as a large element of cost. More than one easily recognized agency of your civilization will tend to reduce the number of your small farms, and to throw the business of food supply completely under the control of your wealthy and capital class. Your small holders now occupying lands of the lower grades of fertility, and who with their limited means but little more than sustain themselves, will readily submit their titles to capitalists, who with the advantage of costly labor saving machines, will find the cultivation of a number of such tracts thrown into one of sufficient profit to engage their means. The labor saving contrivances which your ingenuity has devised for agricultural pursuits will hasten the demand for larger holdings, and although they greatly cheapen the expense of production, they will not lower the market price of food. While machinery more than makes up for its curtailment of the services of labor, by its cheaper supplies to it in articles of manufacture, no such open and unrestricted competition can exist in the supply of commodities which require, as a necessity of their production, a natural agent whose possession is in every sense of the word a monopoly.