F ROM time to time it is announced that the pioneer has vanished, that the world has filled up with humanity. This is like saying that the age of exploration is over because man has reached the two poles. To the Canadian at the edge of cultivation in the prairie provinces or to a Chinaman on the plains of Inner Mongolia or northern Manchuria it will be news that his conquest of the soil is over. Where the Kansas pioneer was in 1885, there the Canadian pioneer is today. Though he has more technic offered him, he yet leads a life of experiment at the edge of the plowed land. The million-acre ranch was once a feature of our West. The famous XIT, or Farwell, ranch of Texas with over 3,000,000 acres of land was the theme of many a Western booster to whom such size meant not empty country but a symbol of the typical American scale of thought and living. Today we look to Rhodesia for the like. The London Times for July reports Sir Abe Bailey's purchase from the British South Africa Company of the Rhodesdale Estates (near Gatooma, southwest of Salisbury)I600 square miles, or 1,019,542 acres! Between the Limpopo River and Victoria is a second tract of nearly 2,750,000 acres purchased for over ?500,000 by Sir David P. de V. Graaft and Sir Ernest Oppenheimer.1 In the November, 1925, issue of the new Economic Record of Australia there is an account of the trials of the pioneer near Perth, West Australia. Under the Land Settlement Act of 1922 there was set in motion the machinery for enticing the settler to the edge of cultivation, thus winning taxable land and the asset of new population streams at one stroke. It was an outgrowth of a British imperial policy destined to direct British emigrants to land within the empire. It called for cooperation between dominion and home government in the matter of subsidies. It was of the type of induced settlement, under a subsidy plan, to strengthen not only a nation but the empire of which it is a part. There are two aspects to this pouring out of humanity upon land capable of agricultural development that are of supreme social significance today. The one is the huge scale on which landed estates