CYRIL GEORGE HOPKINS 



enough, would undermine and destroy civilization by cutting 

 off the means of supporting life comfortably if at all. 



In proof of this he cited not only the inexorable logic of 

 mathematics, particularly of subtraction, or rather division, 

 carried to the nth degree, but he also pointed to the extensive 

 regions of the world the soils of which are practically ex- 

 hausted, and to the fact that thousands of our own once pro- 

 ductive areas are already abandoned. 



He was at first opposed by the farmers who averred that 

 they were now getting larger yields than when the country 

 was new. He met this by calling attention to the better seed, 

 better tools, and generally better methods now in vogue, and 

 when he called attention to the fact that America has aban- 

 doned lands of her own, the answer was, "Oh, they never were 

 very good." Confronted with the fact that some of our aban- 

 doned lands, as in Virginia, were once very fertile, the whole 

 subject was dispatched with, "Oh, they have been farmed a 

 long time." And Doctor Hopkins would say, "What is two 

 or three hundred years in the life of a people, and where shall 

 we find new lands when we have done with our old what the 

 Aryan has always done to his ground — treated it not as a 

 living organism, but as a mine to be worked out, then aban- 

 doned?" 



Doctor Hopkins was even scoffed at as a prophet of evil, 

 and by others educated as he had been in the best laboratories, 

 showing that man may make scientists, but only God makes 

 the prophet. He was confronted by the fact that civilizations 

 have existed in certain regions from the remotest antiquity. 

 In reply he was forced to call attention to the fact that such 

 civilizations had either long since retreated to river valleys 

 fed from vast interiors, as in China and Egypt, or else were 

 subsisting by the hardest labor, as in many parts of India, 

 where as reported by Dean Vivian of Ohio, one good meal in 

 every two days is accounted satisfactory even to the farmer, 



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