The agricultural population of our country is scattered over the continent instead of being confined to one or two of our most fertile states. The total farming population could without difficulty find room to work on the rich soil of the single state of Illinois. And such concentration would in many respects be a decided advantage to the people. If all of the agricultural population of the United States lived in Illinois there would of course be more workers to the acre in that state than there are now; there would, however, be plenty of room for them to move around, and work could readily be found for all of them. But while work could be found for all of them in the fields of Illinois they could not raise as much agricultural produce when concentrated in the single state as they could when scattered over the entire country. Or to say the same thing in another way, agricultural soil is so constituted that the labor of ten men with a reasonable supply of capital cannot produce as much wheat on a hundred acres of land as the same amount of labor and capital can produce on a thousand acres of land. This is the basic fact of the law of diminishing returns.