114 NEW BRUNSWICK FORESTRY 



know what was done with them and what has been done with them and how 

 they have been managed. Well, now, remember this, the farmer is the 

 grand inheritor of the earth. The earth was not prepared for pulp mills, 

 the earth was not prepared for railroads, but it was prepared for the agri- 

 culturist, and so, I stand here tonight, on behalf, so to speak, of the primitive 

 man, on behalf of the man as be has become educated and elevated and 

 enlarged in his intellect and prepared to do the best he could I stand here 

 for that class of people, who are the aborigines and the finishers of this great 

 work. The world was made for men to- lire o-n and they could not live with- 

 out the farmer ; the farmer was the great thing that was worked out and 

 studied out in the creation of all we befeol'df and all we remember. Well,, 

 thai being the case, the farmer too has not done his work very well ; the 

 farmer, as he has operated along all the lines of M bnsiDe&s r has destroyed 

 the trees almost wherever he could destroy them, stwl even today,, one reason 

 why the great immigration into this country is going to tfoe West, is because 

 there are no trees here. But the great West wowiM not e-xist if it had not 

 S>een for the crops of trees that for numbers of e^mturies in the past grew 

 and fell and was moulded into that great alluvial plain, which is the body 

 -and grandeur of the West. But here in our countey r when tfoe farmer under- 

 took to settle it, he took an axe and destroyed all the trees he could see, 

 that *he came in contact with. I remember goin;up the Tobique some years 

 ao-o and was astonished at the beautiful land. I thought I never saw inore 



O 



beautiful land and you could hardly catch sight of a tree over all that beauti- 

 ful country. When the farmer began to settle t'Ms country he went into th% 

 wilderness and cut down the trees and now the Jsnsdbermaji recfirires the inter- 

 vention of tho law in order that he may be successful in bis operations and 

 Iris work. 



Kow *'*ou say "how ia the agriculturist interested in the trees?" In 

 the first place, take the head waters of all oar rivers and our streams. If 

 you destroy the trees around these head waters, you destroy all the farms 

 finally that are on the banks of the streams Sowing down through the land. 

 I am told, and I believe it, that in mid-summer now, on the River St. John, 

 the River gets about two feet lower in the dry time of summer than it did, 

 a r half a century ago. That is because the trees have been cut from the. 

 head waters and the banks of the streams and if that goes on, it is going to 

 brino- desolation it may be a century hence, but it is bound to come ; there- 

 fore it is that the lumbering business should be carried on, so that the head 

 waters of the streams will be protected, and that is a part of the business of 

 trees whether at the head waters or other places, trees operate in keeping 



