]
"Practically the human excrement of the whole country is nearly all
so disposed of as to be lost to the soil. The present population of
the United States is not far from 35,000,000. On the basis of the above
calculation, their annual food contains 200,000 tons of phosphoric
acid, being the amount contained in about 900,000 tons of bones, which,
at the price of the best flour of bone, (for manure,) would be worth
over $50,000,000. It would be a moderate estimate to say that the other
constituents of food are of at least equal value with the other
constituents of the bone, and to assume $50,000,000 as the money value
of the wasted night-soil of the United States every year.
"In another view, the importance of this waste can not be estimated
in money. Money values apply, rather, to the products of labor and to
the exchange of these products. The waste of fertilizing matter reaches
farther than the destruction or exchange of products: it lessens the
ability to produce.
"If mill-streams were failing year by year, and steam were yearly
losing force, and the ability of men to labor were yearly growing less,
the doom of our prosperity would not be more plainly written, than if
this slow but certain impoverishment of our soil were sure to continue.
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