Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 9.djvu/384

374 landlord could be so absurd as to suffer such havock to be made.

All the acts for encouraging plantations of forest-trees are, I am told, extremely defective; which, with great submission, must have been owing to a defect of skill in the contrivers of them. In this climate, by the continual blowing of the west-south-west wind, hardly any tree of value will come to perfection that is not planted in groves, except very rarely, and where there is much land-shelter. I have not, indeed, read all the acts; but from inquiry, I cannot learn that the planting in groves is enjoined. And as the effects of these laws, I have not seen the least, in many hundred miles riding, except about a very few gentlemen's houses, and even those with very little skill or success. In all the rest, the hedges generally miscarry, as well as the larger slender twigs planted upon the tops of ditches, merely for want of common skill and care.

I do not believe that a greater and quicker profit could be made, than by planting large groves of ash, a few feet asunder, which in seven years would make the best kind of hop poles, and grow in the same or less time, to a second crop from their roots.

It would likewise be of great use and beauty in our desert scenes, to oblige cottagers to plant ash or elm before their cabins, and round their potatoe gardens, where cattle either do not or ought not to come to destroy them.

The common objection against all this, drawn from the laziness, the perverseness, or thievish disposition, of the poor native Irish, might be easily answered,