The French began to do this in the fourteenth century. 

 France, as thickly settled as it is, has maintained its cultivated timber 

 for five hundred years, while the West with its scattered population is 

 about to make an end of its wild forests in seventy-five years. In con- 

 trast to the forestry conditions of France are those of southern Tunis. 

 It was once a very fertile country, but the Arab conquest destroyed 

 all the trees and now the ruins of its old capital, Suffetula, stand in an 

 uninhabited desert. "Not long after the conquest," says M. Jusse- 

 raud, "an Arab chronicler recalled in his book the former times of 

 prosperity and added : * But in those days, one could walk from Tripoli 

 to Tunis in the shade.' : 



*.* -4 



CONFESSION TO NEXT GENERATION 



Caustic clipping from a graduating address to the Fresno High 

 School by Dr. Frederick Burk. 



' ' We dislike to go on with these embarrassing confessions, but you 

 will learn the whole wretched story yourselves sometime, and we may 

 as well tell you. As for the coal and iron, our fathers left us enough 

 to last for two or three thousand years if it had been economically 

 mined according to some system established by law. We regret to tell 

 you, upon the authority of Andrew Carnegie and John Mitchell, that 

 we Ve wasted in getting out what we could use what should have lasted 

 eighteen hundred or two thousand years. The coal may hold out 

 another two hundred years and the iron one hundred years, but both 

 will come high in your time. We wish we did not have to mention the 

 oil and the natural gas, but we may as well tell you that we've sucked 

 them out of the earth almost completely and wasted them. 



Dear next generation, such is part of the shameful explanation 

 truth compels us to make to you concerning the waste and loss of your 

 patrimony. We've skimmed the cream and have led jolly lives we 

 do sincerely hope you like skimmed milk, and little of it. When you 

 are shivering with the cold in a coalless country, when you are nurs- 

 ing one blade of grass to grow for you where two grew for us, w r hen 

 you have ceased automobiling on account of the high price of oil, then 

 you'll remember us in our riotous plenty. Don't be too angry with 

 us. We robbed you. We took the bread out of your mouths, you our 

 babes, and fed it to the vultures who were fattening upon our national 

 dishonor. But our sins have been the sins of ignorance rather than 

 of willfulness. Your fathers were happy, devil-may-care fellows, 

 whose courage, as war patriots, you must in justice honor, but who 

 never had any comprehension of the meaning of a civil patriot nor 

 the slightest realization that it required any of the qualities of courage, 

 self-sacrifice for the common good, and intelligence which in war 

 patriotism we have exemplified." 



