The Fragile Earth Beneath Our Feet

As a matter of theory it is easier to correct than to create, but as a matter of practice the precautions of conservation are disregarded and trampled under foot, as it were, of the eager instinct to devour and destroy. Prof. Liebig, a more practical reasoner than Gibbon, lays bare the cause of the decline of Rome in the sentence: 'The drain of Rome absorbed the well-being of the Roman peasant.' When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman power, Rome exhausted Italy, and when she had put Italy into her coffers, she poured Sicily in, then Sardinia, then Africa. The power of Rome engulfed the world; this offered its maw to the city and to the globe. This is the secret of the decay of nations: sending the life and fertility of the fields of the country into the city in the form of subsistence, and not sending it back in the form of fertilizers, but letting it waste and finally sink away into the mire and sea. All history repeats itself. The genius who practically solves the problem of the reintroduction of the city's sewerage upon the fields, completing the world's material circulation, will confer a greater boon than the discovery of perpetual motion. These heaps of garbage at the corners of the blocks, these scavengers' carts, these fetid streams of subterraneous slime which the pavement hides from you, do you know what all this is? It is the flowering meadow, the green grass, the satisfied low of huge oxen at evening, the perfumed hay, the golden corn, the bread on your table, the warm blood in your veins—it is health, it is joy, it is life.