industrial change, but what such open spaces in the form 

 of commons have meant to England in the past, the long- 

 struggle to prevent their enclosure by the few shows 

 strikingly, and what is lost by their absence in densely 

 peopled regions of China, where every rod of ground is 

 given up to the material struggle for existence, the ac- 

 counts of all returning travellers tell. 



But it is not a question of breathing-spaces and physi- 

 cal well-being only ; it goes far beyond that and is deeply 

 concerned with the inner life of men. With Nature in 

 her beauty and freedom shut out from so many lives in 

 these industrial and city-dwelling times, it is going to 

 become — has, indeed, become already — a matter of su- 

 preme importance to preserve in their openness, in their 

 unspoiled beauty and the charm of their wild life, their 

 native trees and plants, their birds and animals, the 

 places where the wealth or significance of these things 

 is greatest, the places where the influence of Nature will 

 be felt the most or where the life with which she has 

 peopled the world, and man or chance has not destroyed, 

 may be enjoyed and studied at its fullest. 



The times are moving fast in the destruction of beau- 

 tiful and interesting things. The lost opportunity 

 of one year becomes the bitter regret of thinking 

 people in a few years more. Valuable and inter- 

 esting species of birds, that were still familiar a genera- 

 tion since and that might have added to the delight or 

 wealth of the world forever, have now become extinct — 

 as hopeless of resurrection as if we had known them 

 only in fossil forms. Many a landscape and forest-land 

 that should have remained forever unspoilt and public 

 in the crowded eastern regions of the future has been 

 ruined needlessly or locked up in private ownership. 



In nothing is conservation needed more than in saving 

 all that is economically possible of the pleasantness and 

 freedom of Nature in regions accessible, even by travel, 



4 



