On The Fence 67 



follow. This is in plantations properly put in 

 under my own eye and to some extent with my 

 own hands. Then, what chance can we have for 

 trees planted in the drumhead manner, with the 

 bark below the surface and more earth heaped 

 upon them when they begin to die from excess of 

 earth ? The same treatment will not do for milk 

 cows and he asses. Why not see a difference 

 between the cabbage and the conifer ? All 

 organisms, vegetable as well as animal, have their 

 laws of life and death, varied by the necessities of 

 their ever-varying nature. Yet here in the west 

 of Ireland is a community of land workers who, 

 though greatly satisfied with themselves, have not 

 yet come to see any difference in organic necessity 

 between the Austrian pine of the igneous Alps and 

 the drumhead cabbage of muggy Holland. We 

 cannot persist in ignoring the world in which we 

 have to live and hope to make much out of it. 



The shelter and the beauty are but a small part 

 of my gain from the trees. They have taught me 

 more than I could have thought possible. Among 

 themselves, they make an autonomous society, 

 with a system of government at once wonderfully 

 co-operative and quite as intolerant of incapacity. 

 So much wiser than my countrymen in this 

 essential matter, they do not permit the rabble to 

 join and destroy the best members of the family 

 by weight of numbers, leaving only the inferior 

 seed for the next generation. In a score of ways, 

 the strong fellows protect their weaker neighbours, 

 but they are equally ready to put them to death, 



