288 



CONSERVATION 



themselves as to food and lodging. 

 They own the land. They own the 

 trees. Nothing more ideal than their 

 homes and the estates surrounding 

 them can be imagined. There are 

 others in the land a vast majority 

 who own nothing. 



I am not a socialist and I love wide 

 views and beauty as well as any one can, 

 I believe. But I choose the country 

 with the straight line of dark pines or 

 big white birches crowning every hill 

 or protecting every little brook. I 

 choose the land where the land is bring- 

 ing its quota in every way that science 

 can help the sun. the earth, and the 

 water to do so. They say that want 

 and misery and lack of work are as 

 rampant in Berlin as in London and 1 

 do not doubt that it is so. But Berlin 

 and London are not Germany and Eng- 

 land, and I do know that when one 

 travels and watches, there is a far 



greater proportion of comfort and kind- 

 liness in the former land than in the lat- 

 ter, and that the difference has its root 

 in very much the same place that the 

 trees have theirs deep down. I think 

 that I said something like this before. 

 The world is such a wonderfully made 

 puzzle that the same statement may fit 

 in many corners of it. But the fact re- 

 mains that dear and good as beauty is, 

 utility is also dear and good. It's al- 

 most as bad to preserve trees till they 

 tumble over with dry-rot as it is to cut 

 them all at once. I didn't say that it 

 was as bad I said that it was almost as 

 bad. All of which proves that dearly as 

 I love my English friends, I am think- 

 ing much these days of the thousands 

 who are freezing while the blizzard 

 rages over the great stretches of good 

 English earth kept for hunters and for 

 sheep, and for nothing else. 



View of the Mountain Forests at Biltmore after Lumbering 



