remains, and the injury to fruit-growing would be still greater; and so far as this result would have an effect, it would be to depreciate the market value of land. What this region especially needs is a protection of woodland against the cold westerly and southwesterly winds to cooperate with the benign influence of the lake in other regards. The more forest to the south of this belt of shore-land the better. The more frequently blocks and belts of woodland intervene throughout its entire extent for immediate local shelter and a general screen against westerly winds, the better for the farming and fruit growing interests of this region.
But, so long as it pays an immediate profit to cut down the forest, it will be done. It is not within the province of legislation to stop it. There is no hope from voluntary concert of action. A certain percentage of timbered lands might be exempted from taxation; but this innovation, though talked of, is slow in coming about.[1] To a certain extent tree-destruction should be offset by tree-planting. The planter might not receive his profits so quickly as the destroyer, but nevertheless, wherever timber is likely soon to become scarce, and that is almost everywhere, profits would be sure to accrue from direct sales as well as from the value thus added to the land—generally and, besides the profits in dollars and cents, that accruing from the consciousness of having done a beneficent action.
There are a great many purposes for which timber, and timber only can be used; and for these purposes it should be religiously conserved. I once heard a gentleman say, "I don't worship my timber;" he sacrificed it to gain, in a perfectly legitimate manner it is true. Still the writer must say that he has a sincere respect for the "worship of timber;" it is not a bad kind of religion, so far as it goes.
Immense quantities of timber are slaughtered every year for fuel, and this, too, in a country where there is more coal than anywhere else in the world. There is but one way to stop this branch of the destroying process, and that is by increasing railroad facilities so as to make our coal-fields accessible to every part of the country. Cheap coal will save the timber. When no longer consumed in the millions of household fires in city and country, or in furnaces for the driving power of locomotives and mills, great will be the saving of timber for the necessary purposes for which timber must be used, and for the protection of our cultivated fields and gardens.
The burning of Chicago must make an immediate draft on timbered lands for certain purposes of building for which timber is still largely used. But this great fire, in proving the absolute necessity of building cities of brick, stone, and iron, will operate eventually to the saving of timber and the longer continuance of the protection which our northern
- ↑ Only Missouri, Nebraska, and Illinois, have legislative enactments to encourage the planting of timber. New York, Massachusetts, and California, do something in the same direction through their agricultural societies.
