ught, unknown, unnamed,
Have stretched out upward, seeking the divine.

You sang not deeds of heroes or of kings;
No chant of bloody war, no exulting pean
Of arms-won triumphs; but your humble strings
You touched in chord with music empyrean.
You sang far better than you knew; the songs
That for your listeners' hungry hearts sufficed
Still live,--but more than this to you belongs:
You sang a race from wood and stone to Christ.

THE GREATEST MENACE OF THE SOUTH

WILLIAM J. EDWARDS

In every age there are great and pressing problems to be solved. Perhaps
no section of this country has been confronted with more difficult
problems than the South. I therefore wish to present what I consider to
be the greatest menace of this section.

The one thing to-day, in which we stand in greatest danger, is the loss
of the fertility of the soil. If we should lose this, as we are
gradually doing, then all is lost. If we should save it, then all other
things will be added. Our great need is the conservation and
preservation of the soil.

The increased crops which we have in the South occasionally, are not due
to improved methods of farming, but to increased acreage. Thousands of
acres of new land are added each year and our increase in farm
production is due to the strength of these fresh lands. There is not
much more woodland to be taken in as new farm lands, for this source has
been well nigh exhausted. We must then, within a few years, expect a
gradual reduction in the farm production of the South.

Already the old farm lands that have been in cultivation for the past
fifty or fifty-five years are practically worn out. I have seen in my
day where forty acres of land twenty or twenty-five years ago would
produce from twenty to twenty-five bales of cotton each year, and from
800 to 1000 bushels of corn. Now, these forty acres will not produce
more than eight or nine bales of cotton and hardly enough corn to feed
two horses. In fact, one small family cannot obtain a decent support
from the land which twenty years ago supported three families in
abundance. This farm is not on the hillside, neither has it been worn
away by erosion. It is situated in the lowlands, in the black prairie,
and is considered the best farm on a large plantation. This condition
obtains in all parts of the South today. This constant deterioration of
land, this gradual reduction of crops year after year, if kept u