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ready grown feeble from this cause? When we reflect upon 

 the notorious fact, that nowhere has this deterioration of the 

 soil been so deep, so general, so exigent, as at the South, under 

 the combined effect of an exhaustive culture, and the rude 

 husbandry of slaves, incapable of developing more than a 

 small poition of the native resources of the earth, and remem- 

 ber the aggressive spirit in which Southern statesmen pushed 

 for the acquisition of new territory on our Southern border, 

 and for domination in all the public domain, and the connec- 

 tion of this fatal policy -with the present civil war, who shall 

 say that an accursed thirst for land, more land and new land, 

 stimulated by a wasteful, profligate agriculture, that robbed the 

 soil of its wealth, and the man who tilled it of his wages, has 

 not, in some degree, ministered to that madness of treason 

 which seeks with all the arts and engines of destruction the 

 ruin of the nation ? 



It needs not, however, the present calamity of civil 

 war, or the deserts that mark the limits of ancient states, 

 to make clear as light, that a migratory, nomadic agricul- 

 ture, that first plunders the earth and then abandons it, 

 must at last enfeeble the national strength. It. is all in- 

 volved in the proposition which science has over and over 

 again demonstrated that every crop takes from the soil in- 

 gredients which are Indispensable to vegetation, but of which 

 no soil contains an inexhaustible supply. As a necessary cor- 

 ollary to this proposition, science enjoins upon agriculture as 

 the condition of a self-sustaining and lastino- vitality the pre- 

 cept, that whatever is taken from the soil by the harvest must 

 be restored to it again. The violation of this precept inflicts 

 an injury upon the country, a wrong upon the race. It tends 

 even to the extinction of the human species, or what is quite 

 as bad, to thrust it backward towards barbarism. To destroy 

 the productiveness of the soil, to squander tiie elements of that 

 productiveness, is to destroy the hopes of civilized humanity 

 upon earth. It robs posterity of its just birthright to a career 

 of progress. By what right shall we, the creatures of a day, 



