78 ARBOR DAY 



restraints must be put on the marauders and incen- 

 diaries of the woods. For toleration of this criminal 

 treatment of trees has reached its limit. The senti- 

 ment of our people is ready to sustain the hand of 

 justice in the defense of these true friends of man. 

 And this correction of an evil will prove a change 

 of heart in our people. The freedom and needs of 

 our civilization have in this particular blunted our 

 sensibilities. We have become callous to some 

 serious affronts and wrongs. A whole village has 

 been known to stand by, while a century-old tree, 

 the pride and beauty of a street, has been killed to 

 widen a road or to make room for some petty 

 building. Such outrages have been perpetrated 

 with a coolness that confessed to unconsciousness 

 of wrong. The remedy for such things is education. 

 Somebody must teach our people the rights and the 

 dignity of a tree. They know its money value, but 

 there is something more they need to know and to 

 feel. There is a sanctity in natural growth which 

 goes up to the sublimity of the great mountains. 

 To violate this is to degrade ourselves. To despise 

 or to degrade the splendid things about us is to 

 prove ourselves unworthy of them. The Palisades 

 of the Hudson can be made a signboard or a stone 

 quarry, but the people who would so use them, or 

 who would suffer such desecration of them, would 

 sink as low in the scale of man as they would fall in 

 the esteem of the world. This world is something 



