“The very reverse of what you are now doing,” said my father. “He would clear as much ground as possible for cultivation, putting the wood out of the way as fast as it was cut. He would build with it, burn it, and encourage every body about him to use it for all the purposes of life to which it could be applied. He would encourage pasturage, because cattle are scarce in proportion to the scarcity of open ground. These cattle, continually increasing under the care of man, would wander into the woods, and, though they could not injure large timber trees, would prevent the young plants from coming up, and thus prepare for the decline of the forests.” “If things proceeded in their natural course, the face of the country would be wholly changed in a few centuries,—the hills being bleak and barren, and the vales swampy; the latter having become unfit for the residence of man, and the former an unsheltered and perilous pasture for his flocks. What would a wise landed proprietor do now?” “He would hang woods on the summits of the hills to protect the herds grazing on their slopes,” replied my father. “He would cut trenches in the valley, and, as an effectual drain, would plant the hollows the first moment that their soil would bear the process. Under this management, the high grounds would become fertile, and the bogs would be converted into firm, rich, vegetable soil, ready to repay the labours of the plough.” “Then if you owned the downs of our southern counties,” said I, “or the bogs of Ireland, you would plant and drain and plant again?” “I should, and as much for my own profit as for the general good; for the price of timber rises, of course, in proportion to its scarcity. Now you see how different is the application of labour and capital in these two states of a country. In the one, labour is applied to banish, in the other to create, woods. In the one, cattle are permitted to destroy the young timber; while in the other every tender shoot is protected at an expense of trouble and money. In the one, growing wood is as little valuable a part of the proprietor’s capital as the stones which encumber Mr. Malton’s new fields, and of which he can only make the meanest of his fences; while in the other, it is the resource on which the proprietor mainly relies for the stability of his fortune, not only for the income it brings, but for its power of increasing the productiveness of his pasture and corn lands.” “And do you believe,” said I, “that there are any so stupid as to oppose a different application of labour and capital in these two cases?”