36 MAN ON THE LANDSCAPE 



The profit motive did the rest. Every man knew that a ready market 

 awaited whatever of human use he could gouge from the earth and 

 get to market. Europe, well populated, had money, (much of it 

 extorted from Central and South American Indians) and a head start 

 in the Industrial Revolution so that manufactured goods were avail- 

 able to trade for American food, cotton, wool, metals and other raw 

 materials. 



This country belatedly but with great vigor launched into an 

 industrial program of its own. The poor farm lands of New England 

 poured workers into the factory towns which sprang up at every 

 water power site. To feed these workers, new. and better croplands 

 were sought and occupied as fast as the Indians could be driven out 

 and bought out. America began to pour forth its wealth from mine, 

 and forest, and field. 



Through it all the personal profit motive drove men to prodigious 

 effort to get resources, to get them first, to get them fastest, to get the 

 best and discard the rest. Rugged individualism reached its peak. It 

 was a procedure not far removed from the law of the jungle. 



In the South, cotton plantations with their slave labor duplicated 

 the setup of Rome at its height and the result was the same. Free- 

 men on the farms could not compete successfully. Most of the slaves 

 had no interest in the land, nor in learning how to use it properly. 

 The effort to teach and force them to work properly was discouraging. 

 The inefficiency of slave labor is well known. It carries on a sustained 

 campaign of impassive resistance and insidious sabotage. All these 

 factors favored a simple agriculture. One cash crop, endlessly re- 

 peated, ruined the soil. Erosion came. Washington, Jefferson, Patrick 

 Henry and many other men of perception and vision protested the 

 land use system which was replacing rich fields with gullied wasteland. 

 But, the economic pattern required exploitation if profit was to be 

 made. When prices are determined by a cream-skimming system of 

 supplying the market, the conservative farmer, hunter, or miner is at 

 a disadvantage. 



Planning for sustained production often requires a measure of 

 restraint on present profits for the sake of future stability. The 

 pioneer farmer could get new land so cheaply that it did not pay 

 promptly in cash to take care of what he had. Forests were so exten- 

 sive that any consideration of a future shortage seemed stupid. The 

 problem of the early settler east of the plains was, as he saw it, to 

 get rid of forest, not sustain it. 



In the meantime, in this rosy dream of an inexhaustible America, 

 no one considered the egg and the sperm of the human race. In a 

 country of largely good and virgin soils, capable for a time at least 

 of producing proteinaceous, vitamin-rich foods, the growth in popu- 

 lation was phenomenal. A constant stream of immigrants plus high 

 human fertility brought mounting census figures. And always there 

 was more and more land to feed the horde. Science and invention 

 multiplied the productivity of man. Surpluses were gobbled up by 

 hungry old world peoples. Then the human wave rolled against the 



