238 [Assembly 



pulverising the soil by digging machines, &c. We deprecate our 

 ancestors as skinners of the soil ; the next generation may with 

 equal propriety call us its butchers. We are less generous than 

 our predecssors, for they left the soil unrobbed below a depth of 

 a few inches, while we, with our improved implements, search 

 the very life-blood of fertility, and render future improvement 

 more difficult. No man, Mr. Chairman, can coolly examine the 

 facts and deny the truth of this opinion. Some means must be 

 employed to prevent the universal impoverishment of the soil 

 from proceeding further. What these means are this club may 

 with profit discuss at a future day, for so long as every river in 

 the land is freighted with the constituents of the soil, every city 

 a waste-pipe for the wholesale dissipation of fertility, every barn 

 yard a tributary to larger wastes, and every vessel which carries 

 the productions of our soil to a foreign country without return- 

 ing its equivalent, a poison to our life, giving us no antidote in 

 the agricultural products of other countries — so long will the sub- 

 soil plow, the draining spade, and every other improved imple- 

 ment for increasing the productiveness of the soil, be a curse to 

 the country — so long will he who deepens his furrow but inflict a 

 deeper wound on the fortunes of his successors — so long will the 

 increasing of agricultural products of the country be an insur- 

 mountable barrier to prosperity. 



Solon Robinson — Our young friend has given us some very in- 

 teresting facts — good subjects for thought — but has only glanced 

 at the terrible destruction of soil and consequent decrease of pro- 

 duction in this country. Start from here and travel through all 

 the southern States, and you will see millions of acres that have 

 been ruined — land that was once productive now bearing nothing 

 but old field-pines and broom-sedges. The land has been washed 

 away by the system of plowing up and down hill, till waters that 

 were once navigable have been filled up and changed to dry land. 

 It is even doubtful whether the cultivation of cotton has not 

 proved a curse rather than a blessing to the States where it is 

 grown, for it has rendered vast tracts of land unproductive and 

 too poor to support a sparse population. The system is to cut 

 down and destroy the timber and the soil, and then run ofi" and 



