1884.] CIVILIZATION AND ITS WASTES. 259 



Legislature take this right from him any more than it can take 

 his land." 



Judge Potter, I am sorry to say, is dead, and this reminds me 

 to say that if we are going to be ruled by judges for a while we 

 must look sharp who they are. With good farm Judges, wide 

 awake to the lasting interests of the State, our "malaria compa- 

 nies" would presently be taught by valid decisions from common 

 sense and common law that every land -owner or citizen, whether a 

 riparian owner or not, has a right to his currents -of air as well as 

 water, in their "natural pure state." 



Once we polluted streams with reluctance. My mother used to 

 scold my father for washing his sheep in the brook. She said her 

 grandfather, who had more sheep, used to wash his in a tank 

 below his barn, and let the rich water off upon his meadows. 



In the second generation of wastefulness we tlirow everything 

 into the brook that we want to be rid of. Aside from the ques- 

 tion of health, we are continually destroying each other's indus- 

 tries by dirty water, with much civil war to wit. 



Some good people imagine that as our land grows poorer we 

 shall begin to keep our waste out of the brook, and so the millen- 

 nium will come gradually in that way. But the deplorable fact in 

 Connecticut is, Mr. Chairman, that as the land grows poorer the 

 streams become richer. In our little agricultural coteries — news- 

 paper or scholastic — we are prone to dream that a more frugal 

 science in farming is cutting a wide swath in the minds of men; 

 that we agricultural bankrupts are growing honest and learning to 

 pay our debts to the soil. 



Admitted, if you please, that here and there an enthusiastic, a 

 vainglorious, or a conscience-stricken fellow does set a brilliant 

 example of enriching barren fields for his successors to skin. Such 

 efforts do not amount to a huckleberry, Mr. Chairman, in opposing 

 the grand sweep of American fertility into the sea. 



I know of one or two praiseworthy cases, where individuals and 

 families have religiously worshiped their land and kept it as God's 

 foot-stool, without robbing Peter much to pay Paul. But these 

 estates have not been "settled" or sold lately, and we can't tell 

 what the religion of our children or successors will be. 



We are shown "rich" farms dotted over the eastern states 

 among intervening wildernesses. But the hills from which their 

 richness came look rather dry. The children of wealth are too 



