INSTABILITY OF AMERICAN LIFE. 385 



of all real-estate, is a strong argument for undertaking such plan- 

 tations, and a moderate amount of government patronage and 

 encouragement would be sufficient to render the creation 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 Americom Life. 



AU human institutions, associate arrangements, modes of life, 

 have their characteristic imperfections. The natural, perhaps the 

 necessary defect of ours, is their instability, their want of fixed- 

 ness, not in form only, but even in spirit. The face of physical 

 nature in the United States shares this incessant fluctuation, 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 nomade rather than a 

 sedentary people.* "We have now felled forest enough every- 

 where, in many districts far too much. Let us restore this one 

 element of material hfe to its normal proportions, and devise 

 means of . maintaining the permanence of its relations to the 



into elements of vegetable nutrition, by the chemical agency of the forest, 

 more rapidly than by frost, rain and other meteorological influences. 



* It 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 in them. 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 

 having 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 grad- 

 ual improvements which would increase its value both to the possessor and to 

 the state. 



17 



