Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
I say, then, that a locust plantation, in pretty good land, well
managed, would be twenty feet high in six years; suppose it, however, to
be only fifteen, there would be, at the bottom, wood to make two locust
PINS for ship-building; two locust pins at the bottom of each tree. Two
at the very least; and here would be twenty-two thousand locust pins to
the acre, probably enough for the building of a seventy-four gun ship.
These pins are about eighteen inches long, and, perhaps, an inch and
half through; and there is this surprising quality in the wood of the
locust, that it is just as hard and as durable at five or six years'
growth as it is at fifty years' growth. Of which I can produce an
abundance of instances. The _stake_ which I brought home from America,
and which is now at Fleet-street, had stood as a stake for about eight
and twenty years, as certified to me by Judge Mitchell, of North
Hampstead in Long Island, who gave me the stake, and who said to me at
the time, "Now are you really going to take that crooked miserable stick
to England!" Now it is pretty well known, at least, I have been so
informed, that our Government have sent to America in consequence of my
writings about the locust, to endeavour to get locust pins for the navy.
I have been informed that they have been told that the American
Government has bought them all up. Be this as it may, I know that a
waggon load of these pins is, in America itself, equal in value to a
waggon load of barrels of the finest flour. This being undeniable, and
the fact being undeniable that we can grow locust pins here, that I can
take a seed to-day, and say that it shall produce two pins in seven
years' time, will it not become an article of heavy accusation against
the Government if they neglect even one day to set about tearing up
their infernal Scotch firs and larches in Wolmer Forest and elsewhere,
and putting locust trees in their stead, in order, first to provide this
excellent material for ship-building; and next to have some fine
plantations in the Holt Forest, Wolmer Forest, the New Forest, the
Forest of Dean, and elsewhere, the only possible argument against doing
which being, that I may possibly take a ride round amongst their
plantations, and that it may be everlastingly recorded that it was I who
was the cause of the Government's adopting this wise and beneficial
measure?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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