THE SLAUGHTER OF THE TREES 



Part of a striking and vivid article by Emerson Hough in the May 

 (1908) number of Everybody's Magazine. Its startling statements 

 appear to be substantially correct. Everybody's has kindly given per- 

 mission to use this article. 



In fifty years we shall have whole states as bare as China. The 

 Appalachians will be stripped to bedrock. The Rockies will send 

 down vast floods, which can not be controlled. The Canadian forests 

 north of the Great Lakes will be swept away. Our Middle West will 

 be bare. The Yazoo Delta will be ripped apart, because no levee will 

 be able to stand the floods of those days. We shall be living in 

 crowded concrete houses, and at double the rent we now pay. We 

 shall make vehicles of steel, use no wood on our farms. We shall 

 pay ten cents for a newspaper, fifty cents for a magazine, as much 

 for a lead pencil. Cotton will be immensely higher. Beef will be 

 the privilege of the few. Clothing will cost twice what it costs today. 

 Like Chinamen, our children will rake the soil for fuel or forage or 

 food. We shall shiver in a cold, and burn in a heat, never before 

 felt in this temperate zone, meant by God as a comfortable growing 

 place for splendid human beings unless we wake up. 



My friend, yesterday a man took the meat from your table. Today 

 a man burned down your house. Do you care? 



My friend, yesterday this was America, a rich and beautiful land. 

 Today much of it is a waste and a wilderness. Is that anything to 

 you and me ? 



My brother, in ten years a man is going to force you to rent a house 

 of him, and to pay double what you do now. In twenty years very 

 few of us will be able to afford even rented houses. In thirty years 

 America will no longer be able to build houses of wood unless you 

 shall, meantime, remember that you own America, you who found it, 

 fought for it, and who ought to have a pride in it, if only for the 

 sake of what it might have been. Does this cause you any personal 

 concern ? 



My friend, before a certain great revolution, the peasants who could 

 not own timber of their own, gleaned firewood in the forests of nobles, 

 who swept their backs with the lash of insolence. In England men 

 once prized the scant right to reap with peasant's billhook or shep- 

 herd's crook as high as they could reach among the dead branches of 

 the trees. Soon you will perhaps fight among your kind and kin for 

 the right to glean in another man 's forest by hook or crook you, who 

 but now owned the widest and richest forests in the world. Do you 

 care? 



In Europe one may not fell a tree without paying, without asking. 

 As Americans, we laugh at such restrictions. We are fools. Do you 

 care? We call this the land of the free. It is not such now. We 

 boasted of our land of opportunity open to all the world, but oppor- 

 tunity has been taken from the average man. Do you object? 



Do you think such statements as these sensational, brutal, coarse? 

 My brother, what pen shall be so bitter and abominable as shall make 



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