Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/48

24 luxuriant vegetation, one of the most fertile countries of antiquity, the granary of the Roman Empire; at the close of the middle ages still the realm in whose dominions the sun never set; now in a great measure stripped bare, the old fertility gone, the people in large districts struggling with poverty and want.

Infatuated persons among us turn up their noses at these and similar lessons and superciliously exclaim: What do we in this great and free country of ours care about abroad? Let me say to you that the laws of nature are the same everywhere. Whoever violates them anywhere, must always pay the penalty. No country ever so great and rich, no nation ever so powerful, inventive and enterprising can violate them with impunity. We most grievously delude ourselves if we think that we can form an exception to the rule. And we have made already a most dangerous beginning, and more than a beginning, in the work of desolation. The destruction of our forests is so fearfully rapid that, if we go on at the same rate, men whose hair is already gray will see the day when in the United States from Maine to California and from the Mexican Gulf to Puget Sound there will be no forest left worthy of the name.

Who is guilty of that destruction? It is not merely the lumberman cutting timber on his own land for legitimate use in the pursuit of business gain; it is the lumberman who, in doing so, destroys and wastes as much more without benefit to anybody. It is not merely the settler or the miner taking logs for his cabin and fence-rails and fire-wood, or timber for building a shaft, but it is the settler and the miner laying waste acres or stripping a mountain slope to get a few sticks. It is all these, serving indeed legitimate wants, but doing it with a wastefulness criminally reckless.

But it is not only these. It is the timber thief—making