o action by merely being relieved of its acid
quality. A few crops will reduce a new acid field to so low a rate of
product, that it scarcely will pay for its cultivation; but no great
change is afterwards caused, by continuing scourging tillage and
grazing, for fifty years longer. Thus our acid soils have two remarkable
and opposite qualities,--both proceeding from the same cause; they can
neither be enriched by manure, nor impoverished by cultivation, to
any great extent. Qualities so remarkable deserve all our powers of
investigation; yet their very frequency seems to have caused them to be
overlooked; and our writers on agriculture have continued to urge those
who seek improvement, to apply precepts drawn from English authors,
to soils which are totally different from all those for which their
instructions were intended.

* * * * *

=_Francis Wayland, 1796-1865._= (Manual, pp. 487, 502, 504.)

From "The Limitations of Human Responsibility."

=_157._= SUPERIORITY OF THE MORAL SENTIMENTS.

It is a common remark, that, whenever it has been thought necessary to
arouse the mind of man to enterprises of great pith and moment, the
appeal has always been made to his moral sentiments. Hence, among the
most ancient nations, it was the invariable custom to accompany the
declaration of war with religious ceremonies; and if, in later times,
this custom has become somewhat less usual, the change itself, in a more
remarkable manner, illustrates the tendency of our nature.... But let
victory declare for the assailed, let the invader become the invaded,
let it become necessary to stimulate men to put forth the highest effort
of human daring, and the sacred names of conscience, of duty to family,
to country, and to God, are universally invoked, and the Supreme Being
is urgently appealed to, to succor the cause of a sinking commonwealth.
It is, perhaps, worth while to remark, in passing, that this
consciousness of right is a source of power which belongs specially to
the oppressed, and which, other things being equal, will always insure
to them the victory; and, when other things are not equal, it is
frequently sufficient, of itself, to outweigh a vast preponderance of
physical force. It is, moreover, efficient in proportion to the purity of
the moral principle of a people. We hence perceive the elements of
superiority which, by the constitution of our nature, have been bestowed
upon virtue.

An