"As he stood looking, first at the corn on the treated and untreated land, and then at his wife and large family of children, he broke down and cried like a child. Later he explained to the superintendent who was showing him the experiments, that he had put the best of his life into that kind of land. 'The land looked rich,' said he,--'as rich as any land I ever saw. I bought it and drained it and built my home on a sandy knoll. The first crops were fairly good, and we hoped for better crops; but instead they grew worse and worse. We raised what we could on a small patch of sandy land, and kept trying to find out what we could grow on this black bogus land. Sometimes I helped the neighbors and got a little money, but my wife and I and my older children have wasted twenty years on this land. Poverty, poverty, always! How was I to know that this single substance which you call potassium was all we needed to make this land productive and valuable? Oh, if I had only known this twenty years ago, before my wife had worked like a slave,--before my children had grown almost to manhood and womanhood, in poverty and ignorance!'" "Why wasn't the matter investigated sooner?" asked Miss Russell. "Why didn't the government find out what the land needed long before?" "I am a Yankee," said Percy. "Why have American statesmen ridden back and forth to the national capitol through a wilderness of depleted and abandoned farms in the eastern states for half a century or more before the first appropriation was made for the purpose of agricultural investigation? and why, even now, does not this rich federal government appropriate to the agricultural experiment station in every state a fund at least equal to the aggregate salaries of the congressmen from the same state, this fund to be used exclusively for the purpose of discovering and demonstrating profitable systems of permanent agriculture on every type of soil? Why do we as a nation expend five hundred million dollars annually for the development of the army and navy, and only fifteen millions for agriculture, the one industry whose ultimate prosperity must measure the destiny of the nation? "Moralists sometimes tell us that the fall of the Babylonian Empire, the fall of the Egyptian Empire, of the Grecian Empire, and the Roman Empire, were all due to the development of pride and immorality among those peoples; whereas, we believe that civilization tends rather toward peace, security, and higher citizenship. Is not the chief explanation for the ultimate and successive fall of those great empires to be found in the exhausted or wasted agricultural resources of the country? "The land that once flowed with milk and honey might then support a mighty empire, with independent resources sufficient for times of great emergencies, but now that land seems almost barren and supports a few wandering bands of marauding Arabs and villages of beggars.