Read it through once

Major-General Dirom, of Mount Annan, writing from that place in 1811, says that all over Scotland for about thirty years (from 1780-1810) he has seen "cultivation extending from the valleys to the hills, commons inclosed, wastes planted, and heaths everywhere giving way to corn: ... extension of towns and villages, by new lines of excellent roads, magnificent bridges and inland navigation ... our rapidly increasing population, by our now exporting great quantities of grain from parts of Scotland into which it was formerly imported, and by the superior comfort and abundance which appear in the domestic economy of the inhabitants." If you read any newspaper of to-day published in Canada or in the Argentine Republic, you find exactly the same process at work, and the same enthusiasm about it. Even in 1840-1850 all these improvements were still vigorously going on.