THE SKETCHER.

Oamaru Mail, Volume IV, Issue 1003, 8 July 1879, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE SKETCHER.

THE ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABORER AS OTHERS SEE HIM:. I am not qualified to carry on a discussion of the English farm-labor question. There is much to be said on both sides, perhaps, which is not heard. They have agricultural locksout here, where the laborers of a section, in answer to a behest from their union, make a strike for increased pay, do not get it, and are shut out from work. Much destitution naturally follows; but then they are in a great measure compensated by processions, flags, bands of music, speeches, and beautifully-framed resolutions. All of us can- get along well enough without bread and clothes, and might, possibly, put in a few more weeks on this globe without processions, flags, and music; but we couldnt' exist fourteen minutes in the absence of speeches and resolutions. The farm-laborer here dresses in corduroy pants, wearing an overshirt of coarse white stuff, which reaches nearly to his knees. It is called a smock-frock. He is further adorned with a coarse wool hat having a low, round crown (of the shape of a boil), and a narrow brim rolling up at the sides, and a pair of very heavy. shoes,

whose hobnails leave a distinct mark in soft earth and dust of the road. Pictures a hundred years old give this same costume, excepting that the corduroy trousers reached only to the knees then, and was finished with black or grey stockings. The stockinged legs are occasionally seen now, but are not common. As a sort of homage to that fashion, the laborer of to-day ties a red string about his punts-leg just below the knee. I asked a gentleman why they did it; but he could not explain. I said I didn't see any sense in it; and he dryly added, that perhaps the wearers of the red string didn't see any sense in our wearing two buttons on the back of our coats. However, we wore them. This soothed my curiosity. The laborers support themselves, and pay their own rent, living in little plain cottages near the farms —cottages which the lord of the manor has erected for their accommodation. The wages which they aspire to, and which in some sectious is paid, is fifteen shillings a week. In some places they work for only nine shillings a week. In busy times, the wife and those of the children old enough go into the field. Some of the farmlaborers, with an income of less than twelve shillings a week, support a family of four or five. Awful, isn't it ? But, dear reader, before our late unhappy war, common laborers in America received but six dollars a week. I knew of one who had six children, making a family of eight, who succeeded in keeping out of debt on six dollars a week; and in those days he paid more for his clothing than the English farm-laborer pays, and it wore him a less time. It is not extraordinary for a pair of English shoes to last over two years, and a pair of corduroy pants to wear five years. The latter can be bought for less than eight shillings. Ido not wish to defend the system of wages in England, neither do I desire to drive the poor and helpless into corduroj breeches. I think the farmers ought to pay their help all they can; and I hesitate to attack them, for fear they do. It is said (and it must be so, as I have the word of several London gentlemen) that many of the farmlaborers never touch a mouthful of meat from one years' end to' another. But they get along very well without it. I have seen hundreds of them and their families; and a redder-faced, bright-eyed lot of people I never saw, even in an hotel, where there is an abundance of meat. I honestly advise all farm-laborers to steer clear of meat in future, if they value their health. They have roses on the walls of their cottages, of course; they smoke (and are even beginning to chew), and they have their beer. If they prefer beer to beef, whose business is it ? Their rents are not so high as the American farmlaborer, who lives by himself. Five pounds a year is the highest I believe. There are places where the benevolent wealthy have erected model cottages at a still less rent. On the estate of the Prince of Wales at Sandringham there are quite a number of these cottages, built of stone, with peaked roofs, containing four or five rooms, with a bit of garden attached. The rent is three pounds per annum. They are neat places, well ventilated, and free from lightning-rods. In fact, there are precious few lightning-rods in all England; which is remarkable, considering the English people's dread of a thunderstorm, of which they are always careful to speak in the most respectful terms, calling it a " tempest."' —J. M. Bailey (The Danbury Newsman.)

FORESTS, AND WHAT WE OWE TO THEM. (From the Australasian.) The different standard of intelligence exhibited in the administration of the Imperial Government and that of our own could hardly be more strongly shown than by the fact that the Home Government has recently gone to great trouble to obtain and analyse complete returns regarding the condition of forests and timber supply in the Colonies, and now has published them, just about at the time when our own Government has entered on a course that will lead to the destruction of our poor attempts at forest conservation just to placate one or two political loafers and to secure one or two hireling votes. In these returns we refer to copious evidence is supplied of the ruinous destruction that is going on, and its reckless effects. In some prefatory remarks prefixed to them reference is made to "strong and well-established Governments who look on supinely while the timber is disappearing, and the whole country is becoming treeless and bereft of the shade so necessary to health, and even to existence in tropical climates." "We are further told that "in some cases something little short of meteorological revolution has been caused by the extermination of the woods. Streams once regarded as perennial now run dry under exposure to a tropical sun, and the periodicity of the rainfall has been seriously disturbed in many localities. So many testimonies converge towards the establishment of a connection between rainfall and forest area that it is difficult to resist the conclusion that much which is gained by throwing a little more forest land into cultivation is lost in the lowered fertility and the disturbance of the climatic equilibrium of the whole district."

If anything were required to add weight to the important testimony and serious "warnings which have been published upon the subject, it is supplied by the fact or, we will say, the probability that a cause is already at work in the same direction which is laying waste vast regions of the earth's surface —a cause which we cannot in any way remove, and in regard to which we have only to choose between co-operating with it, or striving to mitigate its effects. Some very extensive and significant evidence was collected some years ago by Professor J. D. Whitney, and published in the American Naturalist, to show that large tracts upon the face of the earth were undergoing dessication, that there has been, and is still, proceeding, a great decrease of water on the earth, and that, if this process continues without limit, we are in danger of drying up. Observations in Central Asia, in Kashmir, in Thibet, point to a great dessication in those regions. "Where great mountain lakes existed there is now nothing but arid valleys. At no distant time, geologically speaking, the valley, of Kashmir

was occupied by a lake. Even "within historical times, the area covered by water in tlie basin of tlie Aral and Caspian seas lias immensely diminished. In.Africa, ruins found in the great Libyan desert testify to great changes having occurred within historic times. Readers of Dr. Livingstone's travels! will remember the evidence he so often j cites of a rapid drying up of Southern | Central Africa. In the great basin | west of the Rocky Mountains, North America, in which the Great Salt I ake lies, there are terraces surrounding the lake to prove how much greater area it occupied in earlier times. In many other parts, such as Arabia, Persia, and even in Europe,, there is cogent proof supplied that the quantity of water is much less than it was at earlier, ami not always at very remote period.*. These effects are m many cases : gether too vast to l;o attributed to any destruction of forests, e\ e;i were tin-re proofs that such forests had ever i'x eu destroyed. We sc-em to be thus brought in face of the formidable phenomeno-i of a gradual and most extensive dedication of the surface «f the earth wishout any means of estimating to what extent it will proceed, and what, if any, will be its limit. And if this is so, we have to choose between co-ope-ration with this influence by destroying as rapidly as possible the forests which oppose this dessication, or endeavoring to counteract it by carefully preserving these as invaluable bulwarks against a terrible foe.

Let us now give a glance at what mankind have done, and are doing, in regard to these alternatives. An article by Mr. P. L. Oswald, in the North American Review for January gives a telling summary of some of the leading facts which answer this question. The writer, after sketching the evidence proving the wholesale destruction of forests in the countries surrounding the Mediteraanean, in the course of which he states that " since the beginning of the sixteenth century the population of the four Mediterranean Peninsulas lias decreased more than 55 millions," and " the rate of the decline from year to year bears an exact proportion to the decrease of the forest area of every district," proceeds : " Afghanistan, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Macedonia, the southern islands of the Mediterranean, and the Avhole of Northern Africa, from Cairo to the western extremity of Morocco—countries which were once blessed with abundance and a glorious climate —are now either absolute sand wastes or the abode of perennial droughts, hunger, and wretchedness ; and wherever statistical records have been preserved, it is proved, beyond the possibility of a doubt, that their misfortunes commenced with the disappearance of their arboreal vegetation."

He goes on to show that in the western hemisphere the forest area has during the last 45 years decreased at the average rate of 11,400 square miles annually. In the United States the rate has advanced from 1600 square miles, in 1837 to 8400 in 18v6. "We have," he says, " been wasting the moisture supply of the American soil at the average ratio of 7 per cent, for each quarter of a century during the last 125 years, and are now fast approaching the limit beyond which any further decrease will affect the climatic phenomena of the entire continent." There is much that is suggestive and significant, if also something that is rather fanciful, in the sentence. '• The treeless regions of America lie chiefly in the west, those of Africa and Arabia in the north, of Europe in the south-east, and of Australia in the north-west; and the theory that all deserts on the face of our globe have been produced by the hand of man is, therefore, supported by the remai-k----able circumstance that the most barren portion of four continents are found on the side turned towards Asia, and which, according to all geographical and ethnological probabilities, must have been first reached by the waves of emigration which emanated from that common home of the human race." The writer's fancy again finds plays in the observation, " But the interest we should take in the preservation of our woods might rest on even a broader basis than their agricultural importance. That man was not created in a desert, nor in a cotton field or a city, but in a forest, is one of the few points in which Moses and Darwin agree; and, with our forests, we would lose their healthgiving atmosphere, the music of their song birds, the purest enjoyments of our early years, and nature's remedy for the mental discords of mankind. Woods are the native life-element of the human race, and a home sickness, an instinctive yearning after the garden home of our forefathers, haunts the nomad of the desert as well as the inhabitant of luxurious cities."

It is not necessary to emphasise the immense importance of preserving a proper proportion of forest to linger on considerations such as these. Not that they are at all trivial. They are of great weight, and there can be no question that, even if it were possible without material injury to turn the whole land into a cornfield or a pasture, it would still be well in the interests of harmony and beauty, and their cultivating' and soothing effects, to retain tracts of woodlands that might present to civilised man glimpses of the primeval nature he has quitted. But in comparison with the tremendous issues involved, not to the well-being, but to the very existence of mankind, these considerations beqome relatively of slight moment. The real question for a community settled in a new land to consider is does it desire to retain the country as a home for future generations, and to preserve the climatic conditions, and the natural balance of forest and champaign by which it is fitted to sustain and nourish human life, or does it rather contemplate becoming a locust visitation to the land, destroying its wealth, rifling its resources, stripping it of its fertility, and leaving it poorer to each successive generation, until it finally remains a desert spot on the face of the earth, unfitted for ever to sustain vegetable and animal life 1 Could the dread importance of this question once be realised to the public mind, it would be answered in a mor ment, and in such a "way as would effectually prevent henceforth the wretched parasites of political life from wasting, to gratify petty objects and ambitions, the natural treasures of the country, which, once gone, are never likely to be replaced.