20 ADDRESS TO THE FAKMERS OF TEXAS. 



taiiis, where it is scax'cely accessible, and where it is least available 

 to their denser and more active coiniminities. But if one-tenth ol 

 the surface of each arable square mile were now covered with state- 

 ly and serviceable forest-trees, those countries would be better fitted 

 to maintain a large population, and their inhabitants would be more 

 thrifty, efiicient, and comfortable, than they are. My own section 

 of this continent has destroyed trees too eagerly, recklessly, and 

 planted them too tardily, too sparingly. My county, of Westches- 

 ter (ISTew York), began to be inhabited by our race fully two hun- 

 dred and fifty years ago ; it has been divided into farms from one 

 to two centuries, and its people are not behind others in sagacity 

 and intelligence; they have still much land covered with mainly 

 young timber ; yet there are not less than five thousand acres in 

 that county to-day exposing rocks thinly and partially covered with 

 soil which ought never to have been stripped bare of trees. Cut 

 off" the timber, if you will, though it is better to thin out than to 

 sweep away a forest where the land is not needed for tillage, and 

 have trees of all ages and sizes growing on each acre devoted to 

 forest. If those five thousand acres were reclad in their primitive 

 vesture, all the springs and strc^ams of the county would be more 

 copious, more equable, more constant, than they are, and the soil of 

 the subjacent fields and mea,dows would endure drouth and retain 

 moisture as they never can while hill-side and rocky ridge are ex- 

 posed to sweep of wind and glare of sun. 



In this new, bounteous, sunny land, where the need of fuel is so 

 much less than with us, yoiT are exposed to the miscalculation made 

 by my ancestors two to four generations back, when, seeing seven- 

 eighths of New-England covered by stately, luxuriant trees, they 

 said, " There will always be timber enough. Let us cut and slash, 

 and clear all the land we can ; others will save wood enough though 

 we destroy all we have ; " but their children have lived to deplore 

 their error. Fifty-five years ago, great pines were cut from hills now 

 included in the city of Burlington, Vermont, sawed into boards, 

 and these rafted down Lake Champlain and the Sorel to the St. Law- 

 rence, and so shipped to Europe, not paying fifty cents per day for 

 the labor, calling the worth of the timber nothing. Barely thii*ty 

 years later, when Vermont began to constrvict her railroads, she 

 had to draw the bridge-timber from Canada, paying for it many times 

 what her own disparaged pines brought when they were so recklessly 

 swept iway. The world is full of experiences as instructive as this. 



