12 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



of these elements to be equal to the mineral constituents of 

 fifteen luuulred million bushels of corn, and that the amount of 

 only two of these elements thus lost hi a single year, was worth 

 at their market price, twenty million dollars. " To suppose," 

 says the' author of these estimates, " that this state of things can 

 continue, and we, as a nation, remain prosperous, is simjily 

 ridiculous. We have as yet much virgin soil, and it will be long 

 ere we reap the reward of our present improvidence. It is 

 merely a question of time, and time will solve the problem in a 

 most unmistalcable manner. "What with our earth-butchery 

 and prodigality, we are each year losing the intrinsic'essence of 

 our vitality. Our country has not yet grown feeble from this 

 loss of its life-blood, but the hour is fixed when, if our present 

 system continue, the last throb of the nation's heart will have 

 ceased, and when America, Greece and Rome, will stand among 

 the ruins of the past." Is it to-day, I would ask, quite certain 

 that our count ly has not already grown feeble from this cause ? 

 "When we reflect upon the notorious fact, that nowhere has this 

 deterioration of the soil been so deep, so general, so exigent, as 

 at the South, under the combined effect of an exhaustive cul- 

 ture, and the rude husbandry of slaves, incapable of developing 

 more than a small portion of the native resources of the earth, 

 and remember the aggressive spirit in which Southern states- 

 men pushed for the acquisition of new territory on our Southern 

 border, and for domination in all the public domain, and the 

 connection of this fatal policy with the present civil war, who 

 sh»ll say that an accursed thirst for land, more land and new 

 land, stimulated by a wasteful, profligate agriculture, that robbed 

 the soil of its wealth, and the man who tifled it of his wages, 

 has not, in some degree, ministered to that madness of treason 

 .which seeks with all the arts and engines of destruction the ruin 

 of the nation ? 



It needs not, however, the present calamity of civil war, or 

 the deserts that mark the limits of ancient states, to make clear 

 as light that a migratory, nomadic agriculture, that first plun- 

 ders the earth and then abandons it, must at last enfeeble the 

 national strength. It is all involved in the proposition which 

 science has over and over again demonstrated, that every crop 

 takes from the soil ingredients which are indispensable to vege- 

 tation, but of which no soil contains an inexhaustible supply. 



