14 



lands to become aggregated in large estates, to yield them- 

 selves exclusively to servile labor, to degrade the farmer, to 

 swell the proletarian mob, to induce the necessity of an outlet 

 for population, and of gaining new resources of food by war 

 and conquest, — and so weaves an argument that startles if it 

 does not persuade us, that the various chapters of this tale of 

 glory and decline, are illustrations of the natural laws of agri- 

 culture and a warning for all time. To his mind, one Liebig 

 had been worth an hecatomb of Gracchi to save the Roman 

 state. 



To no people should the. warnings of science pointing to the 

 ruins of the past come with more power to impress with seri- 

 ous alarm than to our own. F,or there is no people upon the 

 fixce of the earth that would achieve greatness, that prosecutes 

 an agriculture more wasteful, improvident and reckless of the 

 indispensable conditions of an enduring fertility of the soil. 

 We have ravaged the continent like an enemy's territory. 

 With the axe and with fire we have hewn down and burned 

 away the primitive growths of the valley, the hillside and the 

 prairie. Crop by crop, we have drawn from the earth its 

 precious minerals, and borne them hundreds and thousands of 

 miles to distant cities, across the continent, over the ocean, and 

 never returned again them or their equivalents ; until at last, 

 exhausted of its treasures, it refuses longer to yield the abund- 

 ant harvest of its prime, and lapises through successive stages 

 of deterioration into impoverishment, unfruitfulness, and ster- 

 ility. The failing crop, instead of stimulating the American 

 fiirmer to seek a remedy in an improved system of culture, too 

 often prompts him to abandon the lands he has reclaimed from 

 the wilderness, and sends him out in search of fresh fields and 

 pastures new on which to repeat the process of devastation. 

 From New England, he migrates to New York, from New 

 York to Ohio and Wisconsin ; and now Ohio complains of 

 abandoned farms and of migrations to the West. Under this 

 system, while with the increasingacreage brought under culti- 

 vation, the aggregate product of the country has immensely 



