PROGRESSIVE EXHAUSTION. 143 



And more than this, that while the measured acres remain the 

 same and tax him as a part of the property of the nation, the 

 elements of plant-food which alone gave it value are gone, and 

 the land incapable of making return for its maintenance. It 

 is not the ages of long ago and the old world alone, that this 

 vain attempt has cursed and ravaged. But with the first set- 

 tlers the experiment was renewed on the fertile virgin soil of 

 the new world, and in due course of time with the same inevi- 

 table result. The rich lands of all the Atlantic States, which to 

 the early settlers yielded the most bountiful harvest, even under 

 imperfect cultivation, succumbed to the process, and do not now 

 yield food sufficient to feed their people. The plague has 

 already reached the prairie and alluvial farms of the near West, 

 and its ravages are distinctly marked in the rapid decreased pro- 

 duction of all the cereals ; and I fear is destined to spread, and 

 speed onward, until it shall meet its kindred wave sweeping 

 inward from the Pacific shores to the summit of the Sierra 

 Nevada. .It is not that intelligent men have not known that 

 this process was going one, that its progress has not been 

 stayed. The Hebrew, the Grecian and the Roman in their day 

 saw it clearly, deplored it, and endeavored to devise methods 

 by which its results could be averted. The German, the French- 

 man, the Englishman, and the Anglo-Saxon on American soil, 

 have combated the destructive practice ; but the great wave of 

 the majority has pursued its course, but little hindered by the 

 warning voice raised against it. The wealth and prosperity of 

 the nation is measured by its annual crops* and the question, 

 how shall this devastating tide be stayed, becomes one of 

 supreme national importance, equalling, if not overtopping, those 

 of tariff, internal improvement and currency ; and should re- 

 ceive the serious attention, the anxious thought of the states- 

 man and patriot. The great question for us to solve is : can 

 our American soil be made to retain its fertility, its power of 

 producing crops, the food of our own people, and of the millions 

 who are crowding to our shores from every quarter of the globe, 

 unless its annual crops are returned to it, to preserve its capac- 

 ity of production ? The question, though one of national 

 import and importance, addresses itself with peculiar force to 

 every individual man who guides a plough or harvests a crop. 

 Drops make the ocean no more than our individual crops, and 



