E.—REFORM.
The discovery of two new continents has respited the doomed nations of the Old World, but the rapid colonization of those land supplements will soon reduce mankind to the alternative of tree-culture or emigration to the charity-farm of the New Jerusalem. In the words of a great German naturalist, “We shall have to work the world over again.” On a small scale the practicability of that plan has already been conclusively demonstrated. By tree-culture alone arid sand-wastes have been restored to something like tolerable fertility, if not to anything approaching their pristine productiveness. In the lower valley of [[202]]the Nile (the ancient Thebaïd) Ibrahim Pasha set out thirty-five million Circassian forest-trees, of which one-third at least took root, and by their growth not only reclaimed the sterility of the soil but increased the average annual rainfall from four to fifteen inches. In the Landes of western France a large tract of land has been reclaimed from the inroads of the coast sand by lining the dunes with a thick belt of trees, and some fifteen hundred square miles of once worthless fields have thus been restored to a high degree of productiveness. In the Austrian Karst, a sterile plateau of limestone cliffs and caves has been dotted with groves till the valleys have been refreshed with the water of resuscitated springs; and pasture-lands, long too impoverished even for the sustenance of mountain goats, once more are covered with herds of thriving cattle.
The experience of the next three or four generations will not fail to make every intelligent farmer a tree-planter. Our barren fields will be turned into pine plantations, every public highway will be lined with shade-trees. The communities of the next century will vie in the consecration of township groves, in the founding of forestry clubs, in the celebration of arbor days and woodland festivals. The barren table-lands of our central states will be reclaimed, and before the end of the twentieth century the work of redemption will be extended to the great deserts of the Eastern continents. And as a hundred years ago armies of tree-fellers were busy wresting land from the primeval forest, in a hundred years more armies of tree-planters will be busy wresting land [[203]]from the desert. The men that will “work the world over again” will not be apt to forget the terms of their second lease.
In turning up the soil of the reclaimed desert they will unearth the foundations of buried temples, temples once sacred to the worship of gods whose prophets drenched the world with blood to enforce the observance of circumcision rites, wafer rites, and immersion rites, and filled their scriptures with minute instructions for the ordinances of priests and the mumbling of prescribed prayers. In musing over the ruins of such temples, the children of the future will have a chance for many profitable meditations—the reflection, for instance: From what mistakes those alleged saviors might have saved the world if their voluminous gospels had devoted a single page to an injunction against the earth-desolating folly of forest-destruction!