i 1 Address. 



ability to feed the people of the world when our agricultural capacity 

 was fully developed. We have not only invited all nations (except 

 the Chinese) to come to our shores to eat, flourish and be happy, but 

 we have freighted countless ships with the best elements of our soil 

 in the form of grain, and sent it away to seek a market of anybody 

 who would buy, none of whose fertilizing elements will ever be re- 

 turned to sustain the soil which produced it, and we cannot rely per- 

 manently, on the return of anything in any form, as an equivalent- 

 T!i is song of " Exhaustless fertility" was composed and sung by the 

 early settlers of the Atlantic States, and we have heard its echoes 

 from state to state, as our emigrants have selected their locations 

 westward. And to-day the sailor sings the same song, as he heaves 

 up his anchor from the waters of our Pacific coast, that his craft 

 laden with California wheat, may speed on its way to Europe or 

 Asia. No one yet hears or heeds the plaintive cry from New En- 

 gland, the Middle and the older Southern States, of " Exhausted 

 fertility," t: a sterile soil," " crops that don't pay for their cultiva- 

 tion," " can't afford to farm it here," as the farmers of the east 

 leave their old homesteads and seek the unoccupied fields of the west. 

 Yet it is borne along by every breeze, and it is a stern fact. The 

 idea of exhaustless fertility, that any land on this planet can be per- 

 petually cropped, and the produce carried away without destroying 

 its capacity to produce, is a humbug, a phantom of the imagination 

 which has lured whole generations of farmers on the destruction of 

 their soil, to their own impoverishment, and which will, if followed 

 longer, sap the foundation of our national prosperity, notwithstanding 

 our immense resources and native fertility of soil. Massachusetts, 

 Vermont, all the New England, Middle and Southern States as far 

 as South Carolina, originally produced bountiful crops of all the ce- 

 reals, plenty for home consumption and for exportation. But the 

 grains taking from the soil its finest mineral constituents, while its 

 cultivators neglected to return an equivalent, the soil refused to yield 

 paying crops, or the demand outran the supply ; until to-day it is 

 useless to talk of cultivating the grains successfully unless we restore 

 that of which it has been robbed. Our soil is not exhaustless, but 

 on the other hand, has rapidly deteriorated, and this is shown as clear 

 as light, by comparing the average crops of various States now. with 



