L. V. BELL'S ADDRESS. 597 



nures or machinery or animals or wages, if he is so successful 

 as to have some money in advance, he invests on mortgages? 

 or in banks, or perhaps in railroad shares. 



Under our recent date of land cultivation and our systems of 

 loose and imperfect agriculture, we are still drawing annually 

 upon the deposits of food for vegetable life laid up in store, 

 ages before the continent was discovered. As one sweeps 

 along the railroad from Baltimore to Washington, he sees 

 miles and miles of land, once the richest in the world, worn out 

 by repeated cropping and " turned out," as the phrase is, to 

 grow up to scrub oaks and underbrush ; or throughout large 

 sections of the "Ancient Dominion," he may notice counties of 

 " old fields," thus sacrificed to maintain a former splendor. 

 But in no part of the hard soil of New England, do we notice 

 the exhaustive processes to have been so palpably completed, 

 although here at the North, it is undeniable, that the skinning 

 process is not always concealed. Most persons no older than 

 a majority of my audience, will recall the glowing accounts of 

 the Genesee flats, brought back by some adventurous neigh- 

 bor, who had undertaken that long journey, which we now can 

 complete between breakfast and supper. Those rich alluvions, 

 whose fertility was supposed to be beyond diminution, are 

 already deprived of some of their precious elements. The feet 

 after feet of mould, which then was believed would bear crops 

 to all future time, is all there, but its phosphorus or potash or 

 soda has floated to the cities never to return, unless modern 

 science finds the way to replace it. 



In the early days of our railroads, as most of us have sad 

 reasons for recollecting, a fearful error was made in what was 

 called "construction account." Everything of improvement, 

 damage or waste, which should have been carried to " repairs," 

 was carried to " construction." Everything went along most 

 prosperously to the eye, until after the whole " construction " 

 had to be closed, and then the hideous chasm of repairs began 

 to open. In our system of farming we have been drawing 

 prodigiously on " construction,"— the idea of repairs has scarce- 

 ly entered our minds. Our whole system has, in fact, been the 

 most inexact and loose imaginable. Who among us, if asked 

 if his district had reached the highest point of possible culti- 

 vation, could reply in the affirmative ? Any one would say 



