Notes and Correspondence, 



67 



denuded into piteous ugliness, and takes his family to view 

 the jealously guarded and economically beautiful Black Forest 

 of Germany. The coal operator who has made a horror of a 

 whole country, and who is responsible for the dreadful kennels 

 among the culm-banks in which his imported labor lives, travels 

 with his gains to beautiful France, and he may motor through 

 the humble but sightly European villages from whence came his 

 last invoice of workers. 



Every instinct for permanent business prosperity should impel 

 us not only to save in their natural beauty all our important 

 scenic possessions, but, also, to fully safeguard the great and 

 revolutionary development almost certain to follow this epoch- 

 making conference. We are assured by experience that the use 

 of our great renewable resources of soil fertihty is attended with 

 the continuance of beautiful scenic conditions. The smiHng 

 farm, the blooming and glowing orchard, the waving wheat- 

 fields, the rustle of the corn — all these spell peaceful beauty as 

 well as national wealth which we can indefinitely continue and 

 increase. 



Can we not see to it that the further use of our unrenewable 

 resources of minerals and primeval forest is no longer attended 

 with a sad change of beautiful, restful, and truly valuable scenery 

 into the blasted hillside and painful ore-dump, ugly, disturbing, 

 and valueless? 



The waters of our streams must furnish the "white coal" of 

 the future, and electrically turn the wheels of commerce in 

 smokeless economy. Such a change can consider, retain, and 

 sometimes increase the beauty of the scenery; or it can intro- 

 duce the sacrilegious ugliness of which the American gorge at 

 Niagara is at present so disgraceful an example. The banks of 

 the waterways we are to develop can be made so pleasing as 

 to attract travel, rather than repel it, if we care for this land 

 of ours as a place to dwell in, rather than to flee from. 



We cannot, either, safely overlook the necessity for retaining 

 not only for ourselves, but for our children's children, at least a 

 portion of God's glory of mountain and vale, lake, forest, and 

 seaside. His refuge in the very bosom of nature, to which 

 we may flee from the noise and strain of the market-place, 

 for that renewing of spirit and strength which cannot be had 

 elsewhere. True, we can continue and expand our travel tribute 

 to the better sense of the Eastern World, but that will not avail 

 our toiling millions. "Beauty for the few, no more than free- 

 dom or education for the few," urges William Morris ; and who 

 shall say that such natural beauty of scenery as we have is not 

 the heritage of all, and a plain necessity for good citizenship? 



