there was a power of birds of every kind. Now they have vanished
like a cloud. Beside the hamlets and villages, you see, I have
dotted down here and there the various settlements, farms,
hermit's caves, and water-mills. This country carried a great
many cattle and horses, as you can see by the quantity of blue
paint. For instance, see how thickly it lies in this part; there
were great herds of them here, an average of three horses to
every house. [A pause] Now, look lower down. This is the country
as it was twenty-five years ago. Only a third of the map is green
now with forests. There are no goats left and no elk. The blue
paint is lighter, and so on, and so on. Now we come to the third
part; our country as it appears to-day. We still see spots of
green, but not much. The elk, the swans, the black-cock have
disappeared. It is, on the whole, the picture of a regular and
slow decline which it will evidently only take about ten or
fifteen more years to complete. You may perhaps object that it is
the march of progress, that the old order must give place to the
new, and you might be right if roads had been run through these
ruined woods, or if factories and schools had taken their place.
The people then would have become better educated and healthier
and richer, but as it is, we have nothing of the sort. We have
the same swamps and mosquitoes; the same disease and want; the
typhoid, the diphtheria, the burning villages. We are confronted
by the degradation of our country, brought on by the fierce
struggle for existence of the human race. It is the consequence
of the ignorance and unconsciousness of starving, shivering, sick
humanity that, to save its children, instinctively snatches at
everything that can warm it and still its hunger. So it destroys
everything it can lay its hands on, without a thought for the
morrow. And almost everything has gone, and nothing has been