C.—PERVERSION.
Sixteen hundred years ago the highlands of the European continent were still covered with a dense growth of primeval forests. The healthfulness and fertility of the Mediterranean coastlands surpassed that of the most favored regions of the present world, [[198]]and the dependence of those blessings on the preservation of the spring-sheltering woodlands was clearly recognized by such writers as Pliny and Columella, though their own experience did not enable them to suspect all the ruinous consequences of that wholesale forest destruction, which modern science has justly denounced as the ne plus ultra folly of human improvidence. Practical experiments had, however, demonstrated such facts as the failing of springs on treeless slopes, and the violence of winter floods in districts unprotected by rain-absorbing forests, and tree culture was practiced as a regular branch of rational husbandry. But with the triumph of the Galilean church came the millennium of unnaturalism. Rational agriculture became a tradition of the past; the culture of secular science was fiercely denounced from thousands of pulpits; improvidence, “unworldliness,” and superstitious reliance on the efficacy of prayer were systematically inculcated as supreme virtues; the cultivators of the soil were treated like unclean beasts, and for a series of centuries the garden regions of the East were abandoned to the inevitable consequences of neglect and misculture.
Millions of acres of fine forest lands passed into the hands of ignorant priests, who, in their greed for immediate gain, and their reckless indifference to the secular welfare of posterity, doomed their trees to the ax, entailing barrenness on regions favored by every natural advantage of soil and climate. Drouths, famines, and locust-swarms failed to impress the protest of nature. Her enemies had no concern with such worldly vanities as the study of climatic vicissitudes, [[199]]and hoped to avert the consequences of their folly by an appeal to the intercession of miracle-working saints.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Yet the saints failed to answer that appeal. The outraged laws of nature avenged themselves with the inexorable sequence of cause and effect, and in spite of all prayer-meetings the significance of their crime against the fertility of their Mother Earth was brought home to the experience of the ruthless destroyers. In their net-work of moss and leaves forests absorb the moisture of the atmosphere, and thus nourish the springs which in their turn replenish the brooks and rivers. When the highlands of the Mediterranean peninsulas had been deprived of their woods the general failing of springs turned rivers into shallow brooks, and brook-valleys into arid ravines. Summer rains became too scarce to support the vegetation of the farm lands; the tillers of the soil had to resort to irrigation and eat their bread in a harder and ever harder struggle for existence, till vast areas of once fertile lands had to be entirely abandoned, and the arable territory of this planet was yearly reduced by the growth of an artificial desert. And while the summer drouths became more severe, winter floods became more frequent and destructive. From the treeless slopes of the Mediterranean coastlands winter rains descended like waterfalls, turning once placid rivers into raging torrents, and depriving the fields of their small remnant of fertile mould. Hillsides which in the times of [[200]]Virgil had furnished pastures for thousands of herds were thus reduced to a state of desolation almost as complete as that of a volcanic cinder-field; their dells choked with rock debris, their terraces rent by a chaos of gullies and clefts, while the soil, swept from the highlands, was accumulated in mudbanks near the mouth of the river. Harbors once offering anchorage for the fleets of an empire became inaccessible from the ever-growing deposits of diluvium. Yearly mud inundations engendered climatic diseases and all-pervading gnat swarms. Insectivorous birds, deprived of their nest shelter, emigrated to less inhospitable lands, and the scant produce of tillage had to be shared with ever-multiplying legions of destructive insects. Along the south coasts of Italy the shore-hills for hundreds of miles present the same dreary aspect of monotonous barrenness. Greece is a naked rock; forests have almost disappeared from the plains of Spain and Asia Minor; in northern Africa millions of square miles, once teeming with cities and castles, have been reduced to a state of hopeless aridity. The Mediterranean, once a forest-lake of paradise, has become a Dead Sea, surrounded by barren rocks, and sandy or dust clouded plains. According to a careful comparison of the extant data of statistical computations, the population of the territory once comprised under the jurisdiction of the Cæsars has thus been reduced from 290,000,000 to less than 80,000,000, i.e., from a hundred to less than thirty per cent. In other words, an average of seventy-eight in a hundred human beings have been starved out of existence, and the same area of ground [[201]]which once supported a flourishing village, at present almost fails to satisfy the hunger of a small family. For we must not forget that modern industry has devised methods of subsistence undreamed of by the nations of antiquity, and that the religion of resignation has taught millions to endure degrees of wretchedness which nine out of ten pagans would have refused to prefer to the alternative of self-destruction. A whole tenement of priest-ridden lazaronis now contrive to eke out a subsistence on a pittance which a citizen of ancient Rome would have been too proud to ask a woman to share; yet with all their talent for surviving under conditions of soul and body degrading distress, only eight children of the Mediterranean coastlands can now wring a sickly subsistence from the same area of soil which once sufficed to supply twenty-nine men with all the blessings of health and abundance.
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.