26 THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
refused their help and the mills shut down. "Why is 
this?" the people asked; "such things never hap- 
pened before." Had they looked to the mountains 
they would have seen the torn, bare slopes, the sun 
burning the dry earth where once lay water-soaked 
carpets of moss. The forest that once covered the 
mountains as with a garment, giving to man not 
only its wood, but what one might call its spiritual 
force of adjustment, was rapidly passing away. 
What slowly happened in these mountains took 
place more quickly in other regions until the whole 
country suddenly awakened to the fact that in a 
generation or two the wonderful forests of the New 
World would be no more. The prosperity of a nation 
depends also upon its forests. To lose them is a 
calamity too great to be borne, as nearly every one 
of the European nations has discovered through sad 
experience, — Spain in her mountains of bare rock 
reflecting the sun, but not condensing the moisture 
that causes the rains to fall, France in destructive 
floods, Germany in lack of wood, all in one or usu- 
ally many ways feeling the cessation of the benefi- 
cent work of the forests. 
As the population of the world grew denser and 
man discovered his relation to the trees, and that the 
performance of their primal duty had been fatally 
interfered with, he began to bring back the forests, 
a Herculean task now being performed over the 
whole of the Old World. What has happened to 
Europe is beginning to happen to us. Already the 
cry of the farmer is heard and the complaint of the 
