experience of many generations has been preserved,
so as to be equivalent to a like experience, in time and extent, by the
present occupants of the soil.

In America there are no family estates, nor long occupation by the same
family of the same spot. Cultivated lands have changed hands as often as
every twenty-five years from the settlement of the country. The
capacity of our soils to produce, when laboriously and systematically
cultivated, has not been ascertained; there has been no accumulation of
experience by families, and but little by the public; and the effort, in
many sections, has been to draw as much as possible from the land, while
little or nothing was returned to it. 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. But there has been some philosophy, some justice, and considerable
necessity, in the course that has been pursued. Subsistence is the first
desire; and, in new countries where forests are to be felled, dwellings
erected, public institutions established, roads and bridges built,
settlers cannot be expected, in the cultivation of the land, to look
much beyond the present moment. And they a