somewhat of a candidate on the Prohibition ticket. I think you had better see Davis about this." "Well, yes," he says, "that is all right, I know; I knew you was a candidate also on the Democratic ticket, and I thought you might pay this out of Democratic money." (Applause) So I think probably Davis fixed it without my knowledge. I will ask the retiring president to introduce to this audience Prof. Hopkins.

Mr. WALLACE-Permit me to say that Prof. Hopkins has done a wonderful work in the State of Illinois, and I have asked him to present the results of that work, or to tell us about worn-out soils. If your soils out in Kansas are not worn out, they will be unless you mend your ways. Now you want to listen to Professor Cyril G. Hopkins of the University of Illinois. (Applause)

Professor HOPKINS-As agriculture is the basis of all industry, so the fertility of the soil is the basic support of every form of agriculture. Without productive land there could be no American agriculture and no American prosperity. The most important material problem of the United States is to restore, to increase, and to permanently maintain the fertility and productive power of our farm lands. In comparison with this problem others fade almost to insignificance; and we do well to pause in the rush and hurry of our business life, to measure the agricultural record of the past and to consider the possibilities of the future.

I come before this National Congress of patriotic, progressive and influential men and women, not to present theories or opinions, but facts and data, which deserve and should command your immediate serious consideration and your subsequent persistent and effective action.

Intelligent optimism is right and admirable, but blind bigotry paraded as optimism is dangerous and condemnable. "Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again; the eternal years of God are hers"; and this Congress has before it the duty and the right to uncover the facts, to face the truth, and to plan intelligently for the solution of this mighty problem.

That vast areas of land once cultivated with profit in the original thirteen states now lie agriculturally abandoned is common knowledge; and that the farm lands of the great corn belt and wheat belt of the North Central states are even now undergoing the most rapid soil depletion ever witnessed is known to all who possess the facts.

WHAT CROP STATISTICS SHOW.

The crop statistics of the United States now cover two twenty-year periods, and half a decade on the next. A comparison of these two periods shows the average acre yield in the United States to have increased only one bushel for wheat and one-half bushel for rye; while corn decreased one and one-half bushels and potatoes decreased seven bushels per acre. These crops constitute the basis of our human foods, even our supply of meat being largely dependent upon the corn crop. Thus, in spite of the vast areas of new land put under cultivation during

the last twenty years, and in spite of the improvements in dredge ditching and tile drainage, in seed, and in implements and methods of cultivation, the average acre yield shows little or no increase. In striking contrast the census returns show an increase in the population of contiguous continental United States from thirty-eight million to ninety-two million people during the last forty years; and in spite of the fact that to feed our rapidly increasing population we have extended our area of cultivated crops beyond the humid and far into the semi-arid regions, and in spite of reducing our corn exports from 213 million to thirty-eight million bushels and our wheat exports from thirty-four to twelve million bushels during the last decade, nevertheless the most common topic discussed in recent years is the high cost of plain living in these United States.

These are American facts; and, while there need be no sensation, there is need for sense in their consideration. A few people can live on blind optimism or hot air, but something more substantial will be required to feed the progeny of ninety-two millions, and added millions of immigrants. It is said that the high civilization of the ancient Mediterranean countries went down into the Dark Ages with laughter-Dark Ages which covered the face of the earth for a thousand years and which still exist for most of our own Aryan race in Russia and in India, where more people are hungry day by day, and year by year, than the total population of the United States.

The problem which now confronts America is nothing less than the maintenance of prosperity for ourselves and of civilization for our children; for civilization depends upon education, and only a prosperous nation can afford the general education of its people. Poverty is at once. helpless, and soon ignorant and indolent. An impoverished people cannot have adequate schools or schooling.

No greater problem ever confronted any nation than now confronts the United States, but the solution is plain: In a word, we must increase production and limit reproduction, especially the reproduction of the unfit. To solve half of the problem is not sufficient; and, in passing, I must emphasize the fact that, with the most practical scientific systems of farming applied to all the farm lands of the United States, there is still somewhere a limit to the highest possible production of food and clothing materials in this country; but there is no limit to the reproduction and increase of population except the starvation limit, already reached in Russia, India and China; unless the public sentiment of this Nation, in these times of education and general intelligence, will support the inauguration and enforcement of legal laws based upon the established natural laws of heredity.

Just and adequate legislation should be enacted by the Nation for the better control of immigration, and by the states for preventing the reproduction of every form of degeneracy, whether revealed by insanity, criminality, idiocy, deformity, or beggary. Half of all the state revenue

is already required in many cases for the support of the non-productive degenerate classes, upon whose reproduction there is still no check in

most states.

CROP YIELDS CAN BE DOUBLED.

That we can double the crop yields of the United States is not a prediction, but a fact. To say that millions of acres of abandoned farm lands in the older states can be restored and increased in productivity far above the present average for the $200.00 corn-belt lands is merely to speak the truth. To accomplish these objects requires, first of all, that agricultural ignorance shall be replaced with agricultural intelligence in the minds of the people of influence in this nation.

Why should not every influential man and woman in America have a definite and quantitive knowledge of the basic principles that to increase and permanently maintain the productive power of our normal soils, in practical systems of farming, requires the addition to the soil and permanent maintenance of adequate supplies of only three important constituents, limestone, phosphorus, and nitrogenous organic matter?

The limestone is contained in measureless deposits in almost every state. All it requires is that it be quarried and pulverized and transported at a reasonable cost.

The phosphorus is contained in New York, Pennsylvania, Virgina, the Carolinas, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, in the greatest deposits known to the world. All that is required to utilize these great stores of phosphorus for soil improvement in good systems of general farming is to mine and finely pulverize the natural rock and transport it to the farmer's railroad station at reasonable cost.

With abundant supplies of limestone and phosphorus thus provided, the nitrogenous organic matter can then be produced upon the farm by the growing of clover and other legume crops which have power to secure nitrogen from the inexhaustible supply in the air; and by plowing under this organic matter, either directly or in animal manures, the remaining essential mineral plant foods, such as potassium, can then be liberated and made available from the practically inexhaustible supply in the soil.

The man who is willing to study this subject will find that these facts are as true as the fact that the earth is round.

Normal land contains thirty thousand pounds of potassium in the plowed soil of an acre, and the air above contains seventy million pounds of nitrogen; and yet the most common commercial fertilizer sold to the general farmers in the older states contains both nitrogen and potassium, with a small amount of phosphorus. The average farmer who buys fertilizer at all merely accepts the teaching that reaches him, and as a rule this teaching comes through the fertilizer agents, who are now selling to the farmers of Indiana 900 different brands of fertilizers, and to the farmers of Georgia more than 2,000 different brands.

The result is that the ton of fertilizer for which the farmer pays $25.00 contains less than a hundred pounds of phosphorus, whereas he ought to receive and apply to his land a thousand pounds of phosphorus

for the same money.

Phosphorus is the one element we shall always need to buy-phosphorus, the master key to permanent agriculture, permanent industry, and permanent prosperity in America; phosphorus, in which we are exporting, practically giving away, as a nation, a value which amounts. to as much every year as the total value of all the timber on all the Federal lands.

In 1848, Sir John Lawes and Sir Henry Gilbert began at Rothamsted, England, an investigation to ascertain the effect of applying phosphorus to normal soil where a good crop rotation and a practical system of farming were followed. The Norfolk rotation, already well known at that time as one of the best rotation systems, was turnips, barley, clover and wheat. In these practical field experiments the turnips were fed or the land and the animal fertilizer thus produced returned to the soil, which was well supplied with limestone.

THE USE OF PHOSPHORUS.

During the next thirty-six years $29.52 worth of phosphorus was applied to one part of the field; and in comparison with another part of the field cropped and managed, the same, except that no phosphorus was applied, the $29.52 worth of phosphorus produced $98.02 increase in the value of turnips, $37.45 in barley, $48.93 in clover (and other legumes). and $45.99 increase in the value of the wheat. The total value of the crops grown on land not receiving phosphorus during the thirty-six years was $432.43 per acre, while on the phosphated land the crop values amounted to $662.82, an increase of $230.39 from an investment of $29.52 in phosphorus. These statements summarize the results of thirty-six years of careful investigation in practical farming on normal soil; but not one American in a hundred knows, utilizes, or imparts this information. Meanwhile the ten-year average yield of wheat in the United States is fourteen bushels per acre, while Germany's average is twenty-eigh bushels and England's thirty-two bushels per acre; meanwhile the United States continues to export annually, for the paltry sum of five million. dollars, a million tons of our best phosphate rock, carrying away an amount of phosphorus which, if applied to our own depleted and depleting soils, would be worth not five million, but a thousand million dollars, for the production of food for us for the oncoming generations of Americans.

As an average of twenty-four years of carefully conducted field investigations with a four-year rotation of corn, oats, wheat and clover on normal soil at the Pennsylvania State College, the addition of $5.04 worth of phosphorus increased the value of the four crops from $32.55 to $44.72; and a comparison of the two twelve-year periods reveals the

fact that the average crop value per acre per annum decreased on unfertilized land under this rotation from $11.05 to $8.18, a decrease of 26 per cent in the productive power of the land. Meanwhile the average farmer, and even the average business man who owns a farm, allows the land to be depleted and decreased in acre yield because of the erroneous and widespread opinion that crop rotation will maintain the fertility of the soil; whereas the truth, as revealed by every long continued and trustworthy investigation, shows that the rotation of crops will no more maintain the fertility of the soil than the rotation of the checkbook among the members of the family would maintain the bank account.

The rotation of crops should, of course, be practiced, for it helps to avoid injurious insects and fungous diseases, and stimulates the soil to produce larger crops for a time, with the result, however, that the depletion of the essential plant food elements is even more rapid than if wheat were grown every year on the land.

In 1897 the Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station began a field investigation on normal soil with a three-year rotation of corn, wheat and clover-and as an average of the next thirteen years, the application. of eight tons per acre of farm manure increased the value of the three crops from $26.21 to $42.79, and the further addition of $1.20 worth of fine-ground raw rock phosphate increased the crop values from $42.79 to $53.28.

WRONG FERTILIZERS.

Meanwhile the farmers and landowners of Ohio continue, in the main, to use high-priced so-called "complete" fertilizers in the same systems of land ruin that led to the agricultural abandonment of much farm land in the older states.

As an average of nineteen years, the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station applied $14.45 worth of plant food, chiefly in organic manures and acid phosphate, which produced an average increase of $62.25 in the value of the crops in a three-year rotation of cotton, corn and cowpeas, oats and cowpeas, grown on the typical much exhausted upland soil of the South.

The average yield of cotton exceeded a bale to the acre for the nineteen years. Meanwhile the average yield for the Southern states is onethird of a bale per acre.

I have given you some of the cream of the world's work in soil fertility investigations on normal soils, which need for their improvement phosphorus and organic manures, and sometimes limestone. Abnormal, or markedly different soils, require markedly different treatment.

Thus four plots of normal corn-belt prairie soil in McLean County, Ill., produced, in round numbers, only twenty-two, twenty-six, twentytwo, and twenty-seven bushels of wheat per acre in 1911, although some of them had received nitrogen and potassium; while four other similar