Chapter 15 - Page 2

dainty flowers, but a sparse,
wiry, famished grass, scattered thinly over the surface in tufts and
patches, like the hair on a mangy cur.

The giant pines seem to have sucked up into their immense boles all the
nutriment in the earth, and starved out every minor growth. So wide and
clean is the space between them, that one can look through the forest in
any direction for miles, with almost as little interference with the view
as on a prairie. In the swampier parts the trees are lower, and their
limbs are hung with heavy festoons of the gloomy Spanish moss, or "death
moss," as it is more frequently called, because where it grows rankest
the malaria is the deadliest. Everywhere Nature seems sad, subdued and
somber.

I have long entertained a peculiar theory to account for the decadence
and ruin of countries. My reading of the world's history seems to teach
me that when a strong people take possession of a fertile land, they
reduce it to cultivation, thrive upon its bountifulness, multiply into
millions the mouths to be fed from it, tax it to the last limit of
production of the necessities of life, take from it continually, and give
nothing back, starve and overwork it as cruel, grasping men do a servant
or a beast, and when at last it breaks down under the strain, it revenges
itself by starving many of them with great famines, while the others go
off in search of new countries to put through the same process of
exhaustion. We have seen one country after another undergo this process
as the seat of empire took its westward way, from the cradle of the race
on the banks of the Oxus to the fertile plains in the Valley of the
Euphrates. Impoverishing these, men next sought the Valley of the Nile,
then the Grecian Peninsula; next Syracuse and the Italian Peninsula,
then the Iberian Peninsula, and the African shores of the Mediterranean.
Exhausting all these, they were deserted for the French, German and
English portions of Europe. The turn of the latter is now come; famines
are becoming terribly frequent, and mankind is pouring into the virgin
fields of America.

Lower Georgia, the Carolinas and Eastern Virginia have all the
characteristics of these starved and worn-out lands. It would seem as
if, away back in the distance of ages, some numerous and civilized race
had drained from the soil the last atom of food-producing constituents,
and that it is now slowly gathering back, as the centuries pass, the
elements that have been wrung from the land.

Lower Georgia is very thinly settled. Much of the land is still in the
hands of the Government. The three or four railroads which pass through
it have little reference to local traffic. There are no towns along them
as a rule; stations are