358 GRADUAL EXHAUSTION OF THE LAND. 



vation as fast as the old Is worn out, were new land even 

 everywhere available, which in the more settled parts of 

 the country, already divided into small farms, it usually 

 is not. Besides, the majority of those who boast of 

 Anglo-Saxon blood are generally energetic, and their 

 institutions incline them to push everything forward as 

 in a race — their wide continent holding out to them many 

 dazzling hopes and sources of gain. They labour, there- 

 fore, those who till the soil, to make as much and take 

 as much out of the land as they can, and in the least 

 possible time ; probably without either thinking or wish- 

 ing that their actual residence is to be the future home 

 either of themselves or of their children, but rather that 

 interest or expediency may by-and-by carry them all to 

 happier homes in the farther west. 



The result or effect, therefore, of this condition of the 

 rural art, and of the agricultural population, upon the 

 state of the soil, is to bring it by degrees into a state of 

 more or less complete exhaustion. Whatever be its 

 quality or natural fertility, this is the final and inevitable 

 result. In land which is very rich, the effect is produced 

 more slowly — so slow, that those who hold land which for 

 fifty or a hundred years has yielded crops of corn without 

 the addition of manure, will scarcely believe in the pos- 

 sibility of its ceasing at last to give its wonted returns. 

 But old experience and modern science alike demon- 

 strate that the richest soils, by constant cropping, without 

 the addition of manuring substances to replace what the 

 crops carry off, must ultimately arrive at a state of com- 

 parative barrenness. 



It is not to be wondered at that men should be faith- 

 less upon this point, when it is considered how grateful 

 the soil is for kind treatment, and how very long, in some 

 cases, it is before it begins to resent a contrary course of 

 procedure. The lifetime of one man may be spent in gra- 

 dually improving and enriching a field by skilful manage- 



