Farming, as a whole, has not been
a system of cultivation, which implies improvement, but a process of
exhaustion. It has been easier for the farmer, though, perhaps, not as
economical, if all the elements necessary to a correct opinion could be
combined, to exchange his worn-out lands for fresh soils, than to adopt
an improving system of agriculture. The present has been consulted; the
future has been disregarded. As the half-civilized hunters of the pampas
of Buenos Ayres make indiscriminate slaughter of the myriads of wild
cattle that roam over the unfenced prairies of the south, and preserve
the hides only for the commerce and comfort of the world, so we have
clutched from nature whatever was in sight or next at hand, regardless
of the actual and ultimate wrong to physical and vegetable life; and, as
the pioneers of a better civilization now gather up the bones long
neglected and bleaching under tropical suns and tropical rains, and by
the agency of trade, art, and industry, extort more wealth from them
than was originally derived from the living animals, so we shall find
that worn-out lands, when subjected to skilful, careful, scientific
husbandry, are quite as profitable as the virgin soils, which, from the
day of the migration into the Connecticut valley to the occupancy of the
Missouri and the Kansas, have proved so tempting to our ancestors and to
us.
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