"You are certainly welcome to drive this team if you enjoy it."
"I thank you for that also," said Percy. Adelaide noted the word _also, _but she only remarked that she hoped he had enjoyed his travels, though she could not understand what pleasure he could find in visiting old worn-out farms.
"Of all things," she continued, "it seems to me that farming is the last that anyone would want to undertake."
"It is both the first and the last," said Percy. "As you know, when our ancestors came to America, agriculture was the first great industry they were able to develop. Other industries and professions follow agriculture and must be supported in large measure by the agricultural industry. Merchants, lawyers, doctors and teachers are in a sense agricultural parasites."
An hour before he would not have included teachers in this class; for, next to the mother in the home, he felt that the teacher in the school is the greatest necessity for the highest development of the agricultural classes.
"Without agriculture," he continued, "America could never have been developed, and, unless the prosperity of American agriculture can be maintained, poverty is the only future for this great nation. The soil is the greatest source of wealth, and it is the most permanent form of wealth. The Secretary of Agriculture at Washington told me a few days ago that eighty-six per cent. of the raw materials used in all our manufacturing industry are produced from the soil.
"Yes, agriculture is certainly the first industry in this country; and I am fully convinced that to restore the fertility of the depleted soils of the East and South, and even to maintain the productive power of the great agricultural regions of the West, deserves and will require the best thought of the most influential people of America.
"Throughout the length and breadth of this land, the almost universal purpose of the farmers is to work the land for all they can get with practically no thought of permanency. The most common remark of the corn belt farmer is that his land doesn't show much wear yet; and it is holding up pretty well, or as well as could be expected; or that he thinks it will last as long as he does. All recognize that the land cannot hold up under the systems of farming that are being practiced, and these systems are essentially the same as have been followed in America since 1607. What the Southern farmer did with slave labor, the Western farmer is now doing with the gang plow, the two-row cultivator, and the four-horse disks and harrows. In addition he tile-drains his land which helps to insure larger crops and more rapid soil depletion. He even uses clover as a soil stimulant, and spreads the farm fertilizer as thinly as possible with a machine made for the purpose in order to secure both its plant food value and its stimulating effect. Positive soil enrichment is practically unknown in the great corn belt.
"Robbery is a harsh word; and yet the farmers and landowners of America are and always have been soil robbers; and they not only rob the nation of the possibility of permanent prosperity, but they even rob themselves of the very comforts of life in their old age and their children and grandchildren of a rightful inheritance.
"Worse than all this, or at least more lamentable, is the fact that it need not be. The soils of Virginia need not have become worn out and abandoned; because the earth and the air are filled with the elements of plant food that are essential to the restoration and permanent maintenance of the high productive capacity of these soils. Moreover there is more profit and greater prosperity for the present landowner in a possible practicable system of positive soil improvement than under any system which leads to ultimate depletion and abandonment of the land.