B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The love of forest-trees is a characteristic of the nature-abiding nations of the North, and has rewarded itself by an almost complete reversion of the original contrast between the garden lands of the South and the inhospitable wilderness of the higher latitudes. Forest destruction has turned Southern Europe into a desert, while the preservation of forests has made the homes of the hyperborean hunters an Eden of beauty and fertility. “One-third to the hunter, two-thirds to the husbandman,” was the rule of Margrave Philip in his distribution of forest and fields, and expresses the exact proportion which modern science indicates as most favorable to the perennial fertility of our farm-lands. In a single century the forest-destroying Spaniards turned many of their American colonies from gardens into sand-wastes, while, after fourteen hundred years of continuous cultivation, the fields of the Danubian Valley are still as fertile as in the days of Trajan and Tacitus. Along the river-banks and half-way up the foot-hills the arable land has been cleared, but higher [[197]]up the forest has been spared. All the highlands from Ratisbon to Buda-Pesth still form a continuous mountain park of stately oaks and pines, and, as a consequence, springs never fail; crops are safe against winter floods and summer drouths; song-birds still return to their birthland, and reward their protectors by the destruction of noxious insects; meadows, grain-fields, and orchards produce their abundant harvest year after year; famine is unknown, and contagious diseases rarely assume an epidemic form. In Switzerland and Prussia the preservation of the now remaining woodlands is guaranteed by strict protective laws; Scandinavia requires her forest-owners to replant a certain portion of every larger clearing; in Great Britain the parks of the ancient mansions are protected like sacred monuments of the past, and landowners vie in lining their field-trails with rows of shade-trees. The fertility of those lands is a constant surprise to the American traveler disposed to associate the idea of eastern landscapes with the picture of worn-out fields. Surrounded by Russian steppes and trans-Alpine deserts, the homes of the Germanic nations still form a Goshen of verdure and abundance. Forest protectors have not lost their earthly paradise.