Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/47

Rh of a conversational talk than of a formal speech. I pray you, therefore, to divest yourselves of all solemnity of expectation.

Let me in the first place assure you of my most earnest sympathy in your efforts. I am heart and soul with you: nor is this to me a new subject. I know the advocates of the cause to which you are devoted are looked upon by many as a set of amiable sentimentalists, who have fallen in love with the greenness of the woods and break out in hysteric wails when a tree is cut down. I assure you I have been led to take an earnest interest in this subject by considerations of an entirely unsentimental, practical nature, and this, no doubt, is the case with most of you. The more study and thought I have given the matter, the firmer has become my conviction that the destruction of the forests of this country will be the murder of its future prosperity and progress. This is no mere figure of speech, no rhetorical exaggeration. It is simply the teaching of the world's history, which no fairminded man can study without reaching the same conclusion.

I am aware that there are people who turn with a sneer from the expression of any fear that our country may become sterile; who profess to be highly amused when those countries in Asia are pointed out to them which once were called lands “flowing with milk and honey”; whose mountains were covered with forests, whose hills with the vine and the fig-tree and whose plains with waving grainfields, which nourished teeming and prosperous populations, building up mighty cities and great monuments of the civilization of their times; now bare soil, barren and desolate wastes and deserts, roamed over by wild beasts and robbers, the ancient prosperity changed into misery, famine and decay, the people relapsed into barbarism; or when we point to Spain, once covered with a