364 TRANSACTIONS OF THE HORTICULTURAL 



region was once heavily timbered and densely populated with a 

 brave, aggressive, intelligent, highly cultivated and stalwart and 

 conquering race. And he farther says that " in two brief centuries 

 the lumbermen of the United States have destroyed as many trees as 

 the inhabitants of Southern Europe felled in two thousand years." 

 It is his opinion, again, that unless this deforesting our hill slopes is 

 stopped, " the cotton States will be under the necessity of raising 

 their crops by irrigation, while the locust will ravage the plains on 

 the gulf coast. . The soil of the mountain slopes, stripped of their 

 forests, will be washed away by winter rains and thawing snows. 

 Our rivers will become but brooks in the summer, but overwhelming 

 and destructive floods in the spring." Only sixteen per cent, of our 

 national domain is at present covered with timber, either good, bad 

 or indifferent; and this very small percentage, with our large and 

 rapidly increasing population, is fast lessening. 



Long since all first-class European powers have been busily and 

 systematically engaged in replanting their denuded forests. France 

 has some three millions of acres of forest owned by the State. Ger- 

 many has thirty millions of acres owned by the State. In Prussia 

 the forestry system is almost absolute perfection, and in Norway and 

 Sweden the forestry laws are so rigidly enforced that their lumber 

 resources are being increased instead of lessened. Most of these na- 

 tions even give valuable assistance to those who desire to replant 

 timber, especially on old and worn-out lands. If lumber for the next 

 half century is to be as cheap as in the last, as some maintain, why 

 is it that foreign capitalists and syndicates are grasping our remain- 

 ing forests, whole counties at a time? An English syndicate owns 

 in Wisconsin 110,000 acres; another English syndicate owns 175,000 

 acres of the best hardwood timber in Kentucky, for which they paid 

 $2.50 per acre. They expect to realize over $100 per acre from it 

 within twenty-five years. Another English syndicate owns in Mis- 

 sissippi 700,000 acres of the best yellow pine in the State; a Scotch 

 company has absorbed 250,000 acres of forest land in western North 

 Carolina, and Sir Edward Reed, K. C. B., probably thinks his 2,000,- 

 000 acres of Florida lands will eventually make him pretty solid on 

 the lumber question. These corporations and syndicates, all foreign- 

 -ers, nunibering some fifty in all, own about 25,000,000 acres of our 

 national domain, and are comprised of business men, keen as foxes, 

 and with a business training that enables them to take in at a glance 

 the all-important question of present and future supply and demand. 



But, perhaps, some one asks what has this national forestry 

 C[uestion to do with the fair, broad prairies of Northern Illinois? I 

 think it has much to do. No intelligent legislation will be enacted 

 until the attention of the people is called to the subject, and until a 

 general interest is manifested in it. It is the duties of such societies 

 as this, and kindred sister societies, to awaken this interest, furnish 

 the people with information upon the subject, and advocate a proper 



