lems in reclamation. In consequence of this, much is said and done along the lines of drainage, dry farming, irrigation, and forestation. The high-priced agricultural lands require careful management to insure the maintenance of their productive capacity. In consequence of this, emphasis is placed upon seed selection, cultivation, crop rotation, etc. The importance of Nebraska's rich soils may be realized when it is known that the agricultural products coming therefrom have an annual value of more than $300,000,000. It is only natural for the people to show an unusual interest in matters which pertain to their industrial life. This is plainly reflected in the educational development in which state geography, domestic science, and agriculture have considerable prominence in the common schools. In the experiment stations and agricultural college of the University more than usual attention is given to problems which confront rural people.

REFERENCES.

CONDRA, Geography of Nebraska, University Publ. Co., Lincoln, 4th ed. 1910.

DARTON, Professional Papers, 17 and 32, U. S. Geol. Survey.

DARTON, Geol. Atlases, 67 and 8, U. S. Geol. Survey.

BARBOUR, Vol. 1, Nebr. Geol. Surv. Lincoln.

CONDRA, Water Supply Papers, 215 and 216, U. S. Geol. Survey.

JOHNSON, High Plains and Their Utilization, in Vol. IV of 21st and 22nd

Ann. Repts., U. S. Geol. Survey.

TODD, Geol. Atlas 156, U. S. Geol. Survey.

CONDRA, Agri. Geol. of Nebr., in Ann. Rept. St. Bd. of Agri., Lincoln, 1907. STEVENS, Water Supply Paper 230, U. S. Geol. Survey.

WARREN, Agri. Survey of Nebr., in Rept. of St. Bd. of Agri., Lincoln, 1909.

BACK TO THE SOIL.

BY HON. CHAS, H. SLOAN.

Members of the Nebraska Conservation Congress, Ladies and Gentlemen: The United States is thinking conservation, countless people are talking conservation, and some people are doing conservation. To preserve what is good, to reclaim what was injured or lost, to utilize, intensify and waste not are cardinal doctrines of conservation. The phase of the subject which I present is somewhat hackneyed, but, as I have used it for more than a year and have insisted that the return be to the "soil," rather than the "land," I may win your indulgence. Land represents the location, while soil is the active basis principle, the alembic out of which so much is to come. A new commandment is given unto us—“utilize, and waste not." As I left my home county-seat this morning, a young man and woman entered the train amid a shower of rice. From what occurred the passengers debated whether they were going on a honeymoon or were headed to the Nebraska Conservation Congress. The reason for this was, he was taking such active care of the waist.

The United States has within its borders three cities containing collectively seven million people. It has six cities, each containing more than half a million. It has nineteen cities, each containing more than a quarter million. It has fifty cities, each containing more than one hundred thousand each. It has ninety containing more than fifty thousand each, totaling nearly 25,000,000. Broad and inviting as are the villages, fields, praries, and forests, the current of human life in America is drifting toward the cities. When this country took its first census, only thirtyfour out of every thousand people lived in cities or towns. Thirty years later that number increased to forty-nine out of every thousand; sixty years later it had increased to one hundred and twenty-five. In 1900 it reached three hundred and eleven, nearly ten times what it was at the time of the establishment of our government. Our urban population now is nearly five hundred out of every thousand, or 50 per cent. And this despite the fact that creative genius made the country, clothed it with beauty, and filled it with fatness; while the city was man-made to pollute the air, befoul the crystal rivers, deforest the hills, rob and impoverish the soil. Yet paths to the city from every compass point are worn deep by the feet of farmes' boys and girls leaving staid and comfortable farm life for the doubtful lure of the city's uncertainties. Were this drift new and without historical precedent, no great concern might be excited, but the tidal drift of humanity into the cities from the beginning of recorded history has led to anything but desirable national results.

Carlyle has said: "A great city is a great evil," and few will question that statement. True, there is wealth gathered, culture abounds, religion rears her greatest temples, and beauty basks in the light of loveliness. Yet

there is more than a counter-balance of shadow. While Dives feasts, Lazarus, surnamed Legion, fasts and starves. While purity exists, vice is nurtured, debauchery stalks, and crime multiplies. There is the air putrid, the pathway foul, heat oppresses in summer, cold pinches in winter, while manhood and womanhood, weakened and emasculated, become ready victims to sinful and unsanitary surroundings. The white plague finds in congested tenements its multiplied victims. Forty thousand so afflicted children are in New York tenements, while ten times that number daily risk infection in their disease-breeding dwellings, named more politely apartment houses. There, too, the white slave dons her garb of degradation in an atmosphere and environment which forge, fit and fasten the chains of her shortened life and render swift and sudden the loss of her soul.

The metropolitan glare lures fatally the rural moths. They see the apparent warmth and splendor of mansion and saloon. They hear the clink of gold, and are thrilled with the throb of the multitude. And these young men and women, like the ant and the swallow, gregarious in their instincts, leave the ozone of mountain, the pure air of the fields, and the beauties of the valley to herd with the multitude at a risk incalculable and a price often unspeakable. I need speak of nothing fanciful and naturally nothing new. I recall the survivors of the flood and the great tower which was the crowning glory of their city, out of which was wrought the confusion of tongues which drove the inhabitants back to the country to their fields and vineyards, their flocks and herds. Sodom and Gomorrah, with their many people, wealth and municipal wickedness, were destroyed, while the people of the Lord were selected from the dwellers in tents. That chosen people with varying fortunes pleased and displeased the Father of us all, but constantly waxed stronger and grew in divine favor, wealth and power until the great city of Jerusalem was built and the crowning accomplishment, Solomon's temple, was completed. Then there was the inventive to rebellion from within and the invitation to invasion from without. Both followed, Judea ceased to be an important military power until the Maccabees in their hundred years of rule found their safety, not in walled cities, but in the hill country, with their fields and flocks; there they successfully defended their ancient heritage.

Their strength was in the deep-rooted attachment to the soil, out of which they saw their safety and sustenance come. A later poet well described the reason for their loyalty and valor:

"Why cling to our mountain home

With more than filial feeling?
'Tis here that freedom's altars rise
And freedom's sons are kneeling.

"Why sigh we not for softer climes;
Why cling to that which bore us?
'Tis here that freedom's temples rise,
With freedom's sunshine o'er us."

Tyre, Sidon, Carthage, Laodicea and a hundred other cities which marked the sea-coast and dotted the interior of western Asia, northern Africa, and eastern Europe are in ruins or lie buried beneath the shifting sands, while around them lie the wind-swept barren plains, once fertile and beautiful and fair. The rapacity of man destroyed the forests to build the town, let the soil parch under the sun, and parching lost its humus until it was lifted by the winds and blown hither and yon, stifling vegetation and leaving, except along the valleys, desert wastes where once had been produced food sufficient for the millions of earth. The denuded forests tell a sad tale, the barren fields are still more pathetic, but most to be deplored is the vanished energy, fire and patriotism of peoples once noted for culture, industry, and valor, but who now bow to the rule of petty tyrants and lead lives far in the rear of the world's progress. Their history is preserved only by their enemies, and no worthy heritage is provided for the generations to come. And northern China, whose massive and historic wall bordered upon and closed fertile plains and. great forests. They have been exploited by the commercial despoiler. The Chinese, having slept for centuries, were aroused by their Japanese defeat. They find on the rebuilding of their nation that they may support their half billion people, waste stretches of desert where rich soil and great forests once abounded.

Today her people, awake to her unsanitary conditions, and her students seek to throw off that fatalism which looks complacently upon her multiplied infant deaths, are endeavoring to save her starving millions. To do this she must extend her hands for alms, instead of going to the lands, once rich, but now abandoned and despoiled.

Life and movement in the Orient, never so swift in recurring cause and effect, allowed to take place in two thousand years what may require but a few hundred in America. European navigators discovered a continent of forestry sufficient in profusion of materials, should the great terrestrial fires again be lighted and the earth's surface again be moved by the shifting process, to make another layer of coal with its wealth of oil deposits as was produced in the carboniferous age. If we visit the eastern part of our own country, we find stunted pines and scrub oaks clothing the Alleghany and Blue Ridge Mountain backs. The pine swamps of the south, once almost impenetrable, are now marked by charred stumps and meagre undergrowth. Back again to the Rocky Range, where forests apparently inexhaustible stood, yet stand no longer. The greed of man to construct and repair his metropolis, as well as the ax of the vandal and the match of the careless, have destroyed thousands of splendid spectacles which once seemed vast emerald clouds, poised in mid-heaven to beautify the earth and add their potent influence to modify weather and season. Their living roots, which held the soil and the snow in their places, dying lost their grip, and the rich and fertile soil swept by mountain torrent and flood, carried that fertility down to the rivers and thence to the sea.

In this discussion I refer to cities of 25,000 or upward. The towns of lesser size are centers of foci of argicultural activities, and usually carry not the evils of the larger places. Our people have too long been looking to the city to live; looking unto the country to stay until prepared to live. Neglect and impoverishment of the soil have been the curse of the American husbandry. Under the role of "take all and return nothing" until the impoverishment has so far advanced that some local treatment is imperatively demanded. This they give from year to year, or away to the virgin plains of the west, where the work of despoiling the soil may be repeated.

A few years ago I sailed up Narragansett Bay, between Providence, the southern metropolis of New England, and Newport, its great society resort. I asked a fellow passenger what the land along the shore was used for, and he said "agriculture." "What is it worth per acre?" "Twenty-five to thirty dollars." "Why in this land of factories and industries of all kinds is it so cheap?" "Well, each year the ground is so impoverished that if your annual yield would be $10 per acre you must put at least $3 in fertilizer." Where once the cornfields of Roger Williams produced in abundance a spare and reluctant crop is grudgingly yielded by a soil polluted and robbed. The story is told of an old farmer who, however abundant the crops might be generally, would always find some ground for complaint. Something short. One year all the crops were good. The neighbors were anxious to know what the complaint was he would make. "Well," he said, "I have always noticed that these all around big crops are pesky hard on the sile."

The old man was probably an intentional crank and an unintentional philosopher. Drain and drain year after year and not even observe the Mosaic custom to rest the land, letting it run fallow once every seven years. Is it any wonder that New England's fertile lands failed in onetenth of the time that they did in Palestine or China?

I have not drawn this picture to ask the youth of the land to stay or to return to the soil as a matter of duty. I am aware that from their ranks have ever recruited the defenders of the flag, the captains of industry, and the far-seeing men of the state. Duty is a potent call, but it seldom changes a home or occupation. There is this more effective one: Opportunity. It may be the duty of the young man in other communities than this to appropriate the unappropriated blessing, past the age of thirty, though plain of feature, dowerless and not an accomplished cook. The competition in following such duties though is not usually strenuous or crowded; but beautify those features, supply the liberal dowry, and add a course in domestic science, and the young men will hear opportunity's call instead of duty's plea, and many will compete for the prize.

Our civilization has been defined to be merely an enlightened selfishness. The young man or woman has but one life to live. It, within the lines of right living, should be driven to its maximum of effectiveness. And, contemplating the future for twenty years, that period within which your lives will be proved a success or failure, that collective opportunity