SUCH SPENDTHRIFTS OF GOD'S GOOD SOIL!
My, but it's a shame the way we've wasted soil in this country. What spendthrifts! To start with—when the country was first settled—there seemed no end to the fine land, and every one could have a good farm for the asking. All he had to do was to make his wants known to Uncle Sam and then go out and help himself. What happened then? Why, what always happens? Easy come, easy go. These pioneer farmers worked their farms for all there was in them; didn't bother, many of them, even to haul the barn manure into the fields. Then when the old farm was exhausted they moved off to new lands and did the same thing over again.
A HOME IN THE DESERT
Doesn't look much like a home in the desert, does it? But it is—a lovely home in what the old geographies called "The Great American Desert." In the Sahara oases are few and far between, but modern irrigation engineering makes oases to order—thousands and thousands of acres of them!
They ploughed on steep hillsides; they allowed gulches to form, as they will quickly do on sloping ploughed land, if you don't watch out; they cut away the timber. It's easy in a hill country like the eastern part of the United States to have all the good top-soil washed away in twenty years after the forests have been destroyed; the good soil that it probably took 2,000 years to make.
Doctor Shaler[8] estimated that in the States south of the Ohio and the James Rivers more than 8,000 square miles of originally fertile land had, by this shiftless and thoughtless way of doing things, been put into such a state that it wouldn't grow anything; and over 1,500 square miles of this, actually worn down to the subsoil, and even to the bed rock, so that it may never be profitable to farm again—at least not in our time—no matter what they do!
I knew a farmer with a small son to whom he intended to leave the farm when he grew up, who did things like that for twenty years. By the time the little boy was old enough to vote, there was no farm to leave; all the good part of it was gone.
Serious thing for that little boy, wasn't it?