18 FOREST OUTINGS 



the strong. And although the price was toil, the reward of toil was the 

 prospect of independence, freedom the right to stand on your own legs 

 on your land, owned free and clear; the right to look all men who differed 

 with you in the eye, and tell them where to go. 



That was the dream. But with so much virgin country to be developed, 

 and so few hands to do the work, idleness seemed sinful. It was only by the 

 hardest of labors, long endured, that a man without capital, and his wife 

 and children, could stand free. So pioneer Americans all but deified constant 

 toil as a means of freedom, as a means of attaining security and dignity; 

 and they lived, in the main, scorning ease. 



THE SCORN OF EASE was never as intense southward, in all likelihood, as it 

 was among stern and rock-bound Pilgrims facing west. Nor did natural 

 circumstances in the South enforce, until many years had passed, the thrift 

 and care which we associate with New England. New England soil, as one 

 student of geography and its relation to history has in effect observed, was 

 only to be taken and held by patient husbandry; but the warmer and more 

 opulent South lay open to ravishment right away. 



Tobacco, soon introduced there, brought money rolling in from over- 

 seas. It multiplied negro slavery, but it lightened the lot of the white 

 proprietors. Tobacco was a cash crop, but it was a clean-tilled row crop 

 that punished land. Washington ordered tobacco off the soil of Mount 

 Vernon when he saw what it was doing to his fields. Chop, crop, and get on 

 West continued, however, in the face of his warnings, and Jefferson's, 

 and Patrick Henry's. For many years it remained the prevailing mode of 

 development and progress. 



Cotton also levelled great forests, ripped up pleasant grasslands, and 

 assumed an all but absolute sovereignty over some of the best land in the 

 United States. It was also a cash crop, and year after year cotton also 

 exposed Southerners' land to the weather, let the weather whip their film 

 of sustenance, their topsoil, out from under them. So year after year the 

 fields of our southern coastal slopes ran off into the Atlantic Ocean. 



This set going a definite human drain. The South, by fairly constant 

 emigration, has contributed flesh, blood, and many of its more adven- 



