234 
PUBLIC FORESTS-AMERICAN FORESTS. 
would be difficult to induce governments, general or local, to 
make the necessary appropriations for such purposes, but there 
can be no doubt that it would be sound economy in the end. 
In countries where there exist municipalities endowed with 
an intelligent public spirit, the purchase and control of forests 
by such corporations would often prove advantageous ; and in 
some of the provinces of Northern Lombardy, experience has 
shown that such operations may be conducted with great ben¬ 
efit to all the interests connected with the proper management 
of the woods. In Switzerland, on the other hand, except in 
some few cases where woods have been preserved as a defence 
against avalanches, the forests of the communes have been 
productive of little advantage to the public interests, and have 
very generally gone to decay. The rights of pasturage, every¬ 
where destructive to trees, combined with toleration of tres¬ 
passes, have so reduced their value, that there is, too often, 
nothing left that is worth protecting. In the canton of Ticino, 
the peasants have very frequently voted to sell the town woods 
and divide the proceeds among the corporators. The some¬ 
times considerable sums thus received are squandered in wild 
revelry, and the sacrifice of the forests brings not even a mo¬ 
mentary benefit to the proprietors.* 
It is evidently a matter of the utmost importance that the 
public, and especially land owners, be roused to a sense of the 
dangers to which the indiscriminate clearing of the woods may 
expose not only future generations, but the very soil itself. 
Fortunately, some of the American States, as well as the gov¬ 
ernments of many European colonies, still retain the ownership 
of great tracts of primitive woodland. The State of New 
York, for example, has, in its northeastern counties, a vast 
extent of territory in which the lumberman has only here and 
there established his camp, and where the forest, though inter¬ 
spersed with permanent settlements, robbed of some of its 
finest pine groves, and often ravaged by devastating fires, still 
* See the lively account of the sale of a communal wood in Beelepsoh, 
Die Alpen , Holzschlager und Flosser. 
