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THE FORESTS OF UPPER INDIA 



Instances of 

 decay of coun- 

 tries where the 

 forests have 

 been cut down 

 and fertility of 

 the soil lost. 



mahogany furniture. The recently imported mahogany is quite 

 inferior, simply because the old trees were recklessly felled, and 

 no renewal of the forest attempted. 



Spain is a country which once was covered with the finest oak, 

 pine, and chestnut trees. Now one may travel through Spain and 

 see nothing but stumps, from which the branches are cut yearly 

 for firing, or bare mountain sides, scorched by the sun, and with 

 the once fertile loam all washed away by the rain, till nothing is 

 left but sand and rock. The extremes of heat and cold are thus 

 accentuated, as well as the extremes of drought and flood, which are 

 necessarily excessive in a treeless country. The people are badly 

 clothed and fed, and the houses built of cold stone, as timber is 

 almost unprocurable. Such is the condition of a country where the 

 forests have been exhausted. Italy and Sicily (where Hiero once 

 built his 4,000-ton ship), celebrated for their forests and their 

 navies, and also Greece, are in similar plight, and are reckoned 

 among nations once the most powerful and prosperous, now fallen 

 from their high estate and reduced to extreme financial distress 

 and almost to decay ; and their people are, in unfavourable 

 contrast with those of Germany and France, the most struggling, 

 overtaxed, and poverty-stricken peoples in Europe. 



England relies on her maritime position and commercial pros- 

 perity exactly as these countries did, which makes it easy at present 

 to import the timber and other articles of consumption and 

 food that she requires rather than grow them at home. History 

 relates how countries which have relied on such facilities 

 and neglected to keep up home production, but permitted 

 the soil to lose all the shelter that Nature gave it, have 

 inevitably fallen from prosperity sooner or later. This is a 

 reflection that is worthy of the attention of England's statesmen. 

 Already the agricultural population, the backbone of a country's 

 defence and prosperity, is in a very sorry condition ; and in 

 Ireland there is a perpetual sore. 



The tendency of countries to fall from their pristine state of 

 fertility and consequent prosperity when the forests which clothed 

 and sheltered the surface have been tampered with is further ex- 

 emplified by the present dried-up condition of Rajputana and Sind. 

 Famines in India are due to forest denudation. The ancient 

 writings of the Ramayana show that these countries were once 



