“If things proceeded in their natural course, the face of the country would be wholly changed in a few centuries,—the hills being bleak and barren, and the vales swampy; the latter having become unfit for the residence of man, and the former an unsheltered and perilous pasture for his flocks. What would a wise landed proprietor do now?”
“He would hang woods on the summits of the hills to protect the herds grazing on their slopes,” replied my father. “He would cut trenches in the valley, and, as an effectual drain, would plant the hollows the first moment that their soil would bear the process. Under this management, the high grounds would become fertile, and the bogs would be converted into firm, rich, vegetable soil, ready to repay the labours of the plough.”
“Then if you owned the downs of our southern counties,” said I, “or the bogs of Ireland, you would plant and drain and plant again?”
“I should, and as much for my own profit as for the general good; for the price of timber rises, of course, in proportion to its scarcity. Now you see how different is the application of labour and capital in these two states of a country. In the one, labour is applied to banish, in the other to create, woods. In the one, cattle are permitted to destroy the young timber; while in the other every tender shoot is protected at an expense of trouble and money. In the one, growing wood is as little valuable a part of the proprietor’s capital as the stones which encumber Mr. Malton’s new fields, and of which he can only make the meanest of his fences; while in the other, it is the resource on which the proprietor mainly relies for the stability of his fortune, not only for the income it brings, but for its power of increasing the productiveness of his pasture and corn lands.”
“And do you believe,” said I, “that there are any so stupid as to oppose a different application of labour and capital in these two cases?”
“Not in so clear an instance,” replied my father; “but they will not follow the precedent in cases very like it. Can you fancy a family of natives, living, some centuries ago, in a wattled hut in a wilderness of Cumberland, visited every winter’s night by wolves, every spring season with agues, crying out in dismay at the proceedings of a rich neighbour to clear the ground? They would exclaim against having their old customs broken in upon, and would talk of the pleasure of gathering acorns for supper in the glades at sunset, and of their hunts, and of the freedom of their wild life. If their neighbour represented to them that acorns had long been becoming scarce from the disappearance of oaks in the swamps; that their children had been swept from their side by diseases belonging to the locality; and that wild beasts were increasing so fast, that there seemed a probability of the hunters soon becoming the hunted, these new notions would only increase their discontent. If he offered to supply them with certain quantities of grain and meat in exchange for wolves’ heads, they would complain of the degradation of obtaining their food by rendering service instead of the dignified independence of picking up acorns or digging roots out of the soil. They would complain that he had injured them by fencing in ground where the boar used to stand at bay; and if he attempted to shew them the impossibility of restoring the forest and the climate and mode of life to what they were a hundred years before, and the necessity of making some provision for their altered state, they would, instead of listening, tax him with all the distresses and inconveniences which had been prepared before he was born.—Now, Lucy, can you find a parallel case to this?”
“Very easily,” replied I, “Mr. Malton is the rich neighbour, and old Williams was one of the lovers of the old paths; and if you had told us of one who retired back farther into the swamp and built his hut on the sinking trunks of the fallen trees, I should have thought you were prophesying of Norton.”
“Let us bode him no ill,” said my father, “but rather hope that he will plant his foot on firm ground, whatever we may think of the position he has chosen.”
“I can scarcely imagine,” said I, “that any would be found to object to the second process Sir Henry described. The shepherd, striving in vain to win his way against the snow storm on the uplands, in search of his perishing flock, would surely bless the hand that planted woods to shelter his charge?”
“Even he,” said my father, “would pluck up every sapling if he dared, for shepherds are well known to grudge every foot of soil on which their flock cannot browze.”