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.