PRINCIPLES OF PERMANENT AGRICULTURE 19 



be utilized in the fertilization of land is allowed to 

 go to waste in this country, and yet there is 

 scarcely a year when many deaths from starvation 

 do not occur. 



In the face of this lack of sufficient production 

 even for maintaining life in the overcrowded popu- 

 lation of the empire, there are stretches of hundreds 

 of square miles of territory which all the evidence 

 indicates were once inhabited and which now do 

 not support any population, or at most only a few 

 nomadic herdsmen. These lands have evidently 

 been so depleted by unintelligent cropping at some 

 remote period that their abandonment became 

 necessary. Some method of restoring their lost 

 productivity is today called " the problem of 

 China," and has never yet been successfully worked 

 out. The history of India reports a succession of 

 famines in which millions of human beings have 

 perished from starvation in a single year. Even at 

 the present day there is never a year which does 

 not witness thousands of deaths from starvation. 

 The farmers of India live in the most pitiable con- 

 dition of poverty which is known today. They 

 have only enough to eat to maintain life at its 

 lowest ebb in the most prosperous years, so that the 

 least adverse crop condition brings about absolute 

 starvation. On the one time rich cotton land of 

 India, the production at present does not exceed 

 100 pounds per acre of cotton lint, while wheat and 

 other agricultural products yield accordingly. Rus- 

 sia, in spite of its enormous extent of agricultural 

 land and its normal surplus wheat production, has 

 its years of famine as w r ell, and these in times past 

 have caused great suffering among the poor of that 

 country. 



