6 " THE LEAVES OF THE TREE Were FOR THE HEALING OF THE NATIONS. 



ness to blossom as the rose we have saturated the vineyards and orchard a 

 and harvest fields of some of the fairest portions of the globe with the 

 red reign of ferocious warfare. We have felled the venerable forests, in 

 whose green aisles myriads of winged choristers made blithest rnusi 

 from morn till noon, from noon till dewy eve; we have disrobed the 

 mountains of their glorious atmospheric enriching foliage, and have 

 transformed perennial springs into intsrmitteut and terribly destructive 

 torrents; we have exterminated whole species of quadrupeds of birds and 

 fishes; we have introduced the utmost discord, derangement and disorder 

 into the otherwise faultless harmony of nature; and we have torn from 

 the bowels of the earth the precious metals which minister to our cupid- 

 ity, and the minerals with which we decorate our persons in the spirit of 

 the savage still surviving in us, leaving yawning carbon supplying shafts 

 and caverns as pitfalls for all other comers. We have " smitten the earth 

 with a curse/' aud that gentle, patient motlier mourns and suffers by 

 reason of the atrocious cruelty of her offspring, sprung from her womb 

 and nourished every instant of our lives from her bosom, our crimes to- 

 wards her are those of matricides. We never think for a single iustant 

 that if her bounty were suspended if she were to cease to elaborate 

 within her fruitful breasts the sustenance essential to the continuance of 

 our vital functions, the whole of the human race would disappear and 

 our globe would be as sterile as Sahara or the Polar ice, and " unless 

 these days were shortened," some such a calamity would certainly occur, 

 because never before in the history of the human race has the work of 

 devastation proceeded with such frightful velocity and the consequent 

 yearly increase of atmospheric troubles; never before has man been 

 armed with such potent instruments of destruction; never before were 

 these employed simultaneously in the five great divisions of the globe; 

 never before had the restless spirit of " civilized" man and the various 

 appliances by land and sea enabled him to penetrate into the heart of the 

 African, the two American and the Australian continents, and to leave no- 

 island unpolluted by his defiling foot, no race of " savages" untainted by 

 his deadly disorders. All the diseases with which the life upon and 

 through the earth's surface teams, blight and murrain, plague, fire, flood, 

 blizzard, earthquake and famine, all the unnatural disorders, confusion 

 and turbulence of the elements, all the ravages attributable to draught 

 and hurricane; all the contaminations of the atmosphere and the pollu- 

 tion of the streams and water-courses, are the work of the civilized races. 

 We are reaping what we have sown, we are suffering the righteous pen- 

 alties of our own misdeeds in earlier times. When we survey the 

 melancholy ruins of cities that were once vast and populous, rising in 

 dreary masses of shattered and unsightly masonry out of billowy hillocks- 

 of sand, in the midst of arid and sterile plains, and remember that these 

 places were once surrounded by golden corn-fields and leafy groves, and 

 gardens that were bright and fragrant with a tapestry of flowers and 

 choicest of fruits encircled with umbrageous forests in which the deer 

 broused, and choirs of feathered songsters made music by day and night; 

 and that noble rivers, which have entirely disappeared, wound their way 

 in coils of glittering silver through grassy valleys, which afforded pastur- 

 age to countless herds of sheep and cattle, we might well shudder at the 

 thought that the crime of having wrought this cruel transformation is 

 chargeable, not upon a race which has passed away from or out of the 

 globe, but upon ourselves. The generation is unchanged ! The same 

 evil and destructive minds, grown more evil and destructive by reason of 



