What is needed is public action on a scale commensurate with the evil, in the direction of the “reservation” of certain districts as sanctuaries for all wild life. We need, in fact, highland parks, in which the hills themselves, with the wild animals and plants whose life is of the hills, shall be preserved in their wildness as the property of the people; an arrangement which would be equally gratifying to the nature-lover, the naturalist, and the mountaineer, and of vastly more “profit” to the nation as a whole than the disfigurement of its beautiful places. Without at all suggesting that the National Trust should relax its efforts for the rescue by purchase of particular tracts, I think that it would be doing a still greater service if it could see its way to organizing a movement for pressing on the Government the urgent need of taking some active steps to counteract the injury which is being done by commercial interests to the true interests of the people. Otherwise the result will be that while a few spots are saved, whole districts will be lost, and eventually all that the nation will possess will be some oases of beauty in a desert of ugliness. As I have elsewhere pointed out,[39] there is only one thorough solution of the problem, and that is, to nationalize such districts as Snowdonia, Lakeland, the Peak of Derbyshire, and other public holiday-haunts, and so to preserve them for the use and enjoyment of the people for all time. “If parks, open spaces, railways, tramways, water, and other public needs can be nationalized, why not mountains? It is impossible to over-estimate the value of mountains as a recreation-ground for soul and body; yet, while we are awaking to the need of maintaining public rights in other directions, we are allowing our mountains--in North Wales and elsewhere--to be sacrificed to commercial selfishness. If Snowdon, for instance, had been purchased by the public twenty years ago, the investment would have been a great deal more profitable than those in which we usually engage; but while we are willing to spend vast sums on grabbing other people’s territory, we have not, of course, a penny to spare for the preservation of our own.” XIV THE FORLORN HOPE At least we witness of thee, ere we die, That these things are not otherwise, but thus. SWINBURNE.