HISTORICAL RESUME 25 



that can be converted into manure. Horns, 

 hoofs, bones, soot, ashes, old plaster, hair, bar- 

 bers' shavings, contents of sewers, vegetable 

 refuse, human and animal urine being among the 

 substances carefully garnered and used for main- 

 taining soil fertility. 



Even thousands of her women haunt the streets, 

 alleys, lanes and loafing places of men, and with 

 baskets make it a business of gathering hu- 

 man excrement, to be used for soil enrichment. 

 Do we want the future generations of the women 

 of America to sink to the level of gathering human 

 excrement as a last resort that our soils may be 

 stimulated so that they will produce the "food- 

 ful ear" that our hungry hoards be fed? Yet the 

 consummation of this very thing is no "idle 

 dream"; it will become a living reality if our soil 

 waste be not stayed, and unless sane conserva- 

 tion of soil fertility becomes a part of our agricul- 

 tural economy, and unless the business of farm- 

 ing be conducted as our great manufacturing and 

 mercantile establishments are conducted and 

 managed. 



The poverty-famine-stricken-fatalistic-death- 

 longing inhabitants of India have become so 

 through the environment of exhausted, worn-out 

 soil that yields such a scant pittance that these 

 people long for death, believing that somewhere 

 beyond this pale of existence there is a land 

 where they will be better fed. And yet, this 

 famine, poverty-cursed land of mystery, with its 

 fifty rivers winding their way to the ocean 

 through unequaled valleys of once fertile soils, 

 was at one time peopled with a race out of the 



