§ 44. Persistent human stupidity can bring to nought the most beneficent arrangements of nature. The fertility of the soil may be destroyed in spite of tendencies to perpetuate and extend itself, and that in more ways than one.

(1) By the absence of any system of rotation of crops. Year after year men will take the same elements from the soil by growing the same crop upon it, wheat or tobacco, or some other. There is land around Albany where forty-five bushels to the acre was once no excessive yield in wheat, but where at present not more than fifteen can be grown. Much of the country in which the last battles of the late civil war were fought is made up of exhausted tobacco plantations. The whole system of Southern agriculture under the slaveholding regime tended to the same result.

§ 45. (2) By continually taking away from the soil and never making any return. The absence of a single element that enters into the composition of a plant will as much prevent its growth as would the absence of all. "For every fourteen tons of fodder carried off from the soil there are carried away two casks of potash, two of lime, one of soda, a carboy of vitriol, a large demijohn of phosphoric acid, and other essential ingredients" (Prof. Johnston).

Substances that have served as food for birds and animals are worth most to keep up the fertility of the soil. In passing through the digestive organs they are reduced in size to their finest particles, and enriched with organic elements, which the animal derives from the atmosphere. They are especially much richer in nitrogen than the food itself. In some districts of England cattle are stall-fed with oil-cake and other expensive foods, simply for the sake of the manure, and by this system one district of moorland in Lancashire has been reclaimed and brought up to a high degree of fertility.

Whenever, therefore, the products of the soil are consumed in the vicinity of the farm, the farmer will have at hand the means of making such a return to the soil as will keep up and even increase its fertility. But whenever they are transported

RETURN TO THE SOIL.-DENUDATION OF TREES. 47

to a considerable distance for consumption the power to make an adequate return to the soil is seriously diminished, if not absolutely destroyed. The richest soil cannot long sustain such a process of exhaustion, if its proprietors are engaged in sending its natural wealth over land and sea to a distant market.

§ 46. The existence of the means and the power to make adequate returns to the soil is no guarantee that these will be fully employed. Through the sewers of our great cities, and the rivers into which they empty, immense quantities of fertilizing matter are poured into the sea, and are thus utterly lost. The soil around the city of Chicago, for instance, is naturally sterile; in the refuse of her slaughtering-houses the city has the means of raising it to a very high degree of fertility. At a great expense provision has been made to carry off the whole mass and pour it through the Illinois and the Mississippi riyers into the Gulf of Mexico; on all hands the measure is applauded as a bold and wise piece of engineering. Belgium is the only civilized nation that is fully awake to the importance of this subject, but England bids fair to emulate her.

§ 47. (3) The fertility of a country may be destroyed by stripping it of its trees, which seem to affect very greatly the amount of rain that falls on its surface. In some parts of upper India the trees have been cut away, the wells have sunk, ́the rain-fall has ceased, and the country threatens to become a wilderness. The Punjaub seemed likely to meet the same fate; when the British conquered it not a single tree was observed in its vast area, and the country was rapidly becoming a desert, when its plantation was begun and the waste was arrested. Numidia, the Plain of Babylon, and Judea are instances of countries once proverbially fertile, and now barren (it is believed) through denudation. When Europeans occupied the Cape Verde and Canary Islands, and St. Helena, they found them well wooded and fertile. As the trees have been recklessly cut down, droughts have become common, and the capacity of the islands to support a large population has disappeared. The increasing sterility of parts of France, of Lʊm

bardy, and of large districts of Spain, is ascribed to the same cause. In Lombardy it has been found that the denudation of the country contributes to the rapidity and the volume in which its light and friable soil is washed into the Adriatic by the Po and its tributaries. Great injury has thus been done to the agricultural capacity of the country, and still greater is feared. And as a rule, the absence of trees seems to lead to the concentration of the rain-fall in great storms, and the disappearance of better distributed and more moderate showers. The streams

alternate between the destructive violence of torrents and the desolation of drought. The tribes of Arabia perceived the connection between drought and the absence of trees;.the oldest law recognised as binding on the whole peninsula is one for their protection, and it was repeated in the injunctions given by the Prophet and the Caliphs to the captains whom they sent forth to subdue the world.

§ 48. All these ruinous results are matters for control and correction by the action of the state. Individual selfishness is always shortsighted; the nation as the supreme owner of the national domain has the fullest right to guard against its reckless exhaustion. The state is owner of the national domain in a sense that is not true of individual proprietors. Much or all of it that is incapable of individual appropriation, is national property, such as rivers and other inland waters, harbors and fisheries.

Especially is it a question of national policy, because insoluble to individual effort, to bring the farmer and artisan into neighborhood, and secure the consumption of the crops within rea sonable distance of the farm.

CHAPTER FOURTH.

THE SCIENCE AND ECONOMY OF POPULATION.

§ 49. THE evolution of life upon our planet, after passing through the vegetable and the merely animal stages, was crowned in the advent of man, the especial theme of social science. All the great processes of nature's development that preceded his coming, were but preparations to fit the earth to be his home, and to gratify the capacities and bring into action the powers with which he was endowed. The earth was given into his hands, and he was commanded to "multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it."

§ 50. To "subdue the earth," to become master over nature, is, as we have seen, only another way of stating the transition from poverty to wealth. And, as the command implies, that transition has gone hand in hand with the increase of numbers. In the earlier stages of society man lives in comparative isolation from his fellows, weak in the presence of nature's vast powers and therefore poor in the command of her resources The scattered families, the isolated tribes, are unequal to helpful coöperation; for the most part they are confined to the use of such of nature's provisions as are easily accessible to their ineffectual and wasteful labor. First the wild beasts and birds and fruits of the forest are brought into use; then the peaceful flocks whose skins furnish ready-woven clothing, and whose milk and flesh supply food. The wealth of the mine, of the grain-field, of the cotton plantation, are utterly beyond their reach.

§ 51. But with the growth of numbers too great to be fed by the mere pasturage of the land, comes the transition to agricultural industry. New powers of nature, forces that lay unused so long as the scantiness of men forbade efficient coöperation for their mastery, are made to serve man; cattle that ran wild and were slain for food, are tamed to the labors of plough and cart;

plants that grew wild on the hillside are brought under culture, and by improvement and the selection of seed, produce an everincreasing quantity of food and clothing. The waterfall that fell idly over the rocks, or the wind that blew unburdened as it listed, turns the mill; the peat and coal that lay neglected are made into fuel. A division of labor separates the functions of the human members of society, and each species of work is done more effectively and productively for employing the whole time and attention of the men employed in it. Better tools and implements are invented; and last of all, machinery, and the giant forces that actuate it, come into play in man's service, taking the place of muscular strength, and at every advance lowering the value of articles of utility, and making them obtainable in larger quantities and by a larger number of persons.

§ 52. At every step in this great past of man's industrial development, the growth of numbers and of wealth has gone on with equal strides. In the earlier stages the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence is marked and painful; yet beneficent, as thrusting men into closer and more helpful association, and forcing them to adopt wiser and better methods. But every advance has been richly rewarded, for with each acceleration in the rapidity of social movement, the resistance to be overcome has diminished. Each generation has worked not for itself only, but for all that were to come; and the result of all wisely directed work has been to make easier and more effective the task of those who came later. "Other men labored; ye have entered into their labors."

§ 53. It is, therefore, apart from all merely ethical considerations, a wise economic policy for a nation to guard the lives and the health of its people, and to remove all artificial obstructions to the natural growth of population. It is indeed the duty correlative to its right to command their lives and persons in its own defence; but it is also the best policy, in view of both the military strength and the industrial welfare and contentment of its people. For the more people there are productively employed