1884.] CIVILIZATION AND ITS WASTES. 245 



right no one ever had — a wrong, proven by all history, to be the 

 death of men and nations? 



By its ingenious modern cloacae, stuffed v/ith abominations, 

 society slings its contaminated dye-stuff abroad to return malarial 

 boomerangs upon itself. Social artists seem not to have fully 

 learned the sailor's joke about throwing only certain things and 

 "hot ashes to windward." 



In old times as now it seems that poor human nature was prone 

 to run away, like an Arab, from the pestiferous exhalations of its 

 own camp. We may reasonably suppose that some of our Puritan 

 ancestors belonged to that party. Will their descendants be con- 

 tent to see the chosen land of the fathers defiled in turn? 



Some of our women hated the sewer by heredity I know, and 

 would never have a sink in the house so long as they lived. Even 

 in winter time, in old age, they might be seen tottering out to 

 spread the contents of their wash-hand-basins on the snow of the 

 door-yard or garden, over some part of the ground where they 

 knew the land was poor. Those women had a righteous agricul- 

 tural spirit, and felt the everlasting justice of returning due ali- 

 ment to the soil. 



When we leave the earth worse than we found it for man to get 

 a living from then comes trouble. Dishonesty and crime begin 

 with robbing the soil. 



There, in the abused ground we have tilled and wasted, is the 

 birthplace and cradle of primeval disorder, increasing in sorrow, 

 anguish, and despair, as an overwhelming wave of accumulated 

 misery rolls around the world. Overdrafts upon the soil are as 

 disreputable in agriculture as overdrafts upon a bank are in finance. 

 Wrecking a farm or a garden — pilfering from the land for our 

 own selfish desires — educates our minds and hardens our hearts 

 for all villanous ways of taking more than we give — of grasping 

 more than our share. Having once made farms fit to run away 

 from, all treason and unfaithfulness comes easy to us. We are 

 ready, then, in any selfish pinch, to wreck the most sacred luiman 

 institutions. After blasting the land and making a desert any- 

 where, we may carry on murderous civil wars with all the forms 

 and pomp of bogus law, and break and abandon mills, villages, 

 cities, societies, and nations, without a scruple. Time fails to show 

 you the dark side of modern "business," full of dead men's bones 



