Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE DESTRUCTIVE FORCES IN A COUNTRY COMMUNITY We need in the first place to state what we mean by a destructive force in a rural community. It would be more scientific perhaps to speak of destructive agents rather than forces. For example, plant pests and diseases, epidemics among cattle and poultry or hogs and horses. In Bergen County, New Jersey, during the month of July, 1917, the potato crop was nearly ruined by a green plant louse, or aphid, which seemed to thrive on ordinary spraying material like arsenate of lead, pyrox, and Bordeaux mixture, while a good dose of nicotine mixed with whale oil soap, or ordinary washing soap, put them out of business, if you sprayed the vines on the underside of the leaves where the insects did their deadly work. Now, in a sense, you could speak of this pest as a destructive force—but in reality it was an agent that did serious damage to a food product in war time. Take another example: there is no doubt that in our richest farming States, like Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, and the Dakotas, Indiana and Illinois, the soil is being robbed of its fertility, and the next generation will have to work harder to restore its productivity. Of course the custom of the pioneer in plowing the life out of the soil was a good one: he was grappling with a mortgage he had incurred in clearing the land, stocking his farm, building his barns, and providing machinery and tools. The tenant to-day in that same section is confronted with a like problem, for he must plow the life out of the land to pay for two livings—one for the absentee landowner and one for his own family. In both cases the motive is a good and honorable one, but the result is disastrous to the country at large. We could speak of such a system of farming as destructive of l...