396 INSTABILITY OF AMERICAN LIFE, 
age and encouragement would be sufficient to render the crea- 
tion of new forests an object of private interest as well as of 
public advantage, especially in a country where the necessity is 
so urgent and the climate so favorable as in the United States. 
Instability of American Life. 
All human. institutions, associate arrangements, modes of 
life, have their characteristic imperfections. The natural, per- 
haps the necessary defect of ours, is their instability, their want 
of fixedness, not in form only, but even in spirit. The face of 
physical nature in the United States shares this incessant fluc- 
tuation, and the landscape is as variable as the habits of the 
population. It is time for some abatement in the restless love 
of change which characterizes us, and makes us almost a no- 
made rather than a sedentary people.* We have now felled 
forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let 
us restore this one element of material life to its normal pro- 
portions, and devise means of maintaining the permanence of 
its relations to the fields, the meadows, and the pastures, to the 
* Tt is rare that a middle-aged American dies in the house where he was 
born, or an old man even in that which he has built; and this is scarcely less 
true of the rural districts, where every man owns his habitation, than of the 
city, where the majority live in hired houses. This life of incessant flitting 
is unfavorable for the execution of permanent improvements of every sort, 
and especially of those which, like the forest, are slow in repaying any part 
of the capital expended inthem. It requires a very generous spirit in a land- 
holder to plant a wood on a farm he expects to sell, or which he knows will pass 
out of the hands of his descendants at his death. But the very fact of hay- 
ing begun a plantation would attach the proprietor more strongly to the soil 
for which he had made such a sacrifice ; and the paternal acres would have a 
greater value in the eyes of a succeeding generation, if thus improved and 
beautified by the labors of those from whom they were inherited. Landed 
property, therefore, the transfer of which is happily free from every legal 
impediment or restriction in the United States, would find, in the feelings thus 
prompted, a moral check against a too frequent change of owners, and would 
tend to remain long enough in one proprietor or one family to admit of 
gradual improvements which would increase its value both to the possessor 
and to the state. 
