HISTORICAL RESUME 29 



the meantime Nature is applying to the stricken 

 victim the simple slow process of restoration. 



The hosts of soil conquerors and soil despoil- 

 ers have since colonial days been marching 

 through our land. For after the American 

 farmer had mined out the soil wealth of the New 

 England states by sordid tillage, he moved west- 

 ward, preempted more rich virgin soils and mined 

 out their wealth by the same damnable tillage. 

 Not content with the waste he had wrought on 

 the soils he had already pillaged, he moved on 

 into the rich forest covered soils of Indiana and 

 Kentucky, and the prairie soils of Illinois, and 

 laid his devastating hands upon these soils and 

 also pillaged them of their fertility. And yet not 

 content with the waste he had wrought, he crossed 

 the "Father of Waters," carrying with him the 

 same system of sordid tillage and devastated the 

 prairie plains of Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and 

 Kansas, upon which Nature had for centuries 

 garnered and stored fertility which, if it had been 

 carefully conserved, would have poured out its 

 wealth in crops for ages. 



He moved on to the Dakotas, conquered the 

 prairie sod, worked it up into the rich seed bed 

 that grew crops of wheat and flax for a genera- 

 tion that made him rich. But finally Nature re- 

 sented the infamy of one continuous crop grow- 

 ing for years upon her soils, and began to with- 

 draw her bounty, and now that vast area of wheat 

 and flax lands does not produce paying crops of 

 these grains for the small land owner. It is only 

 the large land owner with his thousand of acres 



