ON THE MANUSCRIPTS OF GOD 



of their children in terms of the deadly pit- 

 tances which they may earn in some mill or 

 factory. 



Now the world is beginning to awake to 

 the crime of sacrificing the child for its labor 

 or the tree for its timber, when each has 

 priceless values which may be destroyed by 

 the blind and greedy god of commercialism. 



Like man himself, trees have had their 

 dark ages and years of oppression. In the 

 gray dawn of civilization, when man's ex- 

 pression of himself was almost wholly physi- 

 cal, the tree shared his savage estate, min- 

 istering the crude necessities which were de- 

 manded of it food from fruit and nut trees, 

 fuel, shelter, and material for bows and 

 arrows. As time went on, each generation 

 demanded more of the tree, until so-called 

 civilized man could turn in no direction with- 

 out seeing in his belongings some bounty of 

 the forest. The house in which he lived, its 

 floors and panels of beautifully grained 

 wood, the chairs he sat on, the bed he slept 

 in, the table at which he ate or upon which 

 he wrote, the corks of his bottles, the material 



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