76 AMERICAN FORESTRY 



T have been rather surprised at the opposition to forestry measures 

 tliat lias ('((iiie from one member from the delegation from Kansas. If there 

 is anv state in the Union that has been j)hinting trees and found the necessity 

 of planting trees, it has been Kansas, and for another benefit which comes 

 from the existence of forests, which I have not yet mentioned, but a very real 

 oe the checking of the violence of storms, the tempering of climatic con- 

 ditions, the protection of the home from the invasion of the tempest. 



Thev have cyclone cellars in Kansas. They do not need them in Maine. 



There is scarcely an existing object in civilization more beneficent than 

 the tree. and. as I shall try to show you a little later, we recognize that feature 

 in some of our little daily superstitions, even today. The countries where tree 

 culture has been abandoned, and where the forests have been destroyed, once 

 pojmlous. now represent absolute wastes. Dr. Eliot delivered a most inter- 

 esting address at Boston two or three nights ago, when he and Mr. Roosevelt 

 vied in the earnestness with which they supported our cause. Dr. Eliot called 

 attention to what he had seen with his own eyes in northern Africa and in 

 Sicily and in Italy. In northern Africa, once as you remember, thickly popu- 

 lated and the home of strong nations, even before the days of Greece and of 

 Koine, nations the very memory of which has almost disappeared, he saw a 

 bridge spanning a gap between two hills which was some fifty feet above a 

 dry mass of gravel. It seemed to him extraordinary that the bridge should be 

 ])erched so high up in the air. especially when the place it spanned w\as abso- 

 lutely dry and a mere mass of gravel and small boulders. His guide informed 

 him that in the rainy season that bridge was constantly washed away by the 

 torrents that tore down the mountains. Yet it was fifty feet above what was 

 absolutely dry bed for the greater part of the year. The district was deserted, 

 scarcely a person to be seen in a whole day's march, only some wandering 

 robber Arab, through a district which w^as once the granary of the world. 

 Why? They had cut the trees from the mountain sides; they had stripped the 

 motintain 1oy)s; and with the destruction of the forests came the destruction of 

 the soil itself, until barrenness existed where fertility had once sat crowned 

 as queen. Water present or absent differentiates civilization from the desert. 



In Mesopotamia there were no forests along the plain. There were for- 

 ests at the head of the rivers and for the plain irrigation. This great fertile 

 district supported the great cities of the past, Nineveh and Babylon, nations 

 in the days of early civilization. What are they today without water? Bare, 

 sun-dried plains, over which a few musty brick heaps are scattered to show 

 where once were not merely cities but mighty nations that dominated the 

 world. 



Go further into Asia! Go into that region which was the very cradle 

 of the human race, so thickly populated that the people were absolutely pushed 

 out of it because there was not room for them. First came the great waves of 

 the Greeks and the Latins; then came the wave of the Celts, who followed 

 them; the Gauls, who have left their names in districts in Asia Minor, in 

 what is now Austria, and finally where France now stands today. After the 

 Cells came the Teutons, then the Slavs, then the Magyars, the Huns of Attila, 

 and finally the Tartars and the Turks, all pushed out, not from the fact that 

 the ground was not fertile, but because there were so many people there that 

 it was iiii|)ossible for them to find room. 



What is that district today? The trees have all been cut down from the 

 slopes of the mountains not swiftly, as we are doing it here in the United 

 States, but gradually. With the disappearance of the trees has come the dis- 

 appearance of the soil; and with the disappearance of the soil the disappear- 

 ance of tlie peoi)le; because, when the soil is gone, the people cannot re- 

 main. The very district of the world in which the human race was cradled 



