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 ican mountainside deforested, gashed with gullies, gutted, and soon abandoned.

When the Corsican starts a crop, he does it by planting beautiful trees whose crops he and his children and his children's children will later pick up from year to year, decade to decade, generation to generation. When the American mountaineer wants to sow a crop, he must fight for it, a fight without quarter, a fight to the death of the mountain. First he cuts and burns forests, then he must struggle with the roots and stones in the rough ground of a new field. The sprouting shoots of the trees and tree roots must be cut with a hoe. This is the most expensive form of cultivation, but often the steep and stony ground can be tilled in no other way. In a few seasons the mountainside cornfield is gullied to ruin, and the mountaineer—the raper of the mountain—must laboriously make another field. No race of savages, past or present, has been so destructive of soil as have been the farmers of the southeastern part of the United States during the past century. How long can the United States last at present rates of destruction?

There is one argument for corn. It is a great and destructive argument. The plant is annual. The labor of the husbandman is quickly rewarded. The ruin of his farm comes later.

As between corn and chestnuts as types of mountain agriculture, the labor cost appears to be plainly in favor of the chestnut, but there is that pesky time element.

The chestnut also seems to be more productive than corn. Much sifting of facts among the chestnut growers of Corsica and France seems to show that the chestnut is a better yielder of food in the mountains of those countries than corn and oats are in the mountains of Carolina and Kentucky.

An authoritative book on chestnut culture in France is Le Chataignier, by Jean-Baptiste Lavaille, Paris, Vigot Fréres, 1906. This book says, "A good French chestnut orchard yields on the average thirty-two hectoliters per hectare," or about two thousand pounds per acre.

United States Daily Consular Report, July 20, 1912, p.