autumn. Last year was wet, but this season fires have been blazing for weeks, and of the poor forest, if it were sentient, one might say, "The smoke of its torment goeth up for ever."
No use seemingly made of the potash? No destructive distillation of wood? No pyroligneous acids, or wood tars, or oils, made here? Under more enlightened processes many most valuable products might here be utilized and saved. The whole thing waste, waste! Want of capital, want of knowledge, want of foresight, want of proper labour, and facilities for marketing. Verily, "the greater haste which in the end may prove the lesser speed."
Possibly I am wrong. This process may really be the cheapest and the best, and the game may be worth the candle in the long run. And yet my soul revolts at this wholesale destruction. It was not so the old planters worked, in my old pioneering days, among the forests in India. Charcoal, tar, potash, oil, resins, gums, battens, spars, planks, even lichens and mosses, were all found marketable; and my forest clearing was made to pay in products for the labour expended. I think, too, of the elaborate care bestowed on plantations in Scotland, in Germany, and elsewhere, and sigh as I contrast the thrift there with the extravagance here.
But of course circumstances alter cases, and I am conscious that under altered conditions such as we have here, I am but poorly qualified to judge as to what is best. And yet such wholesale waste and destruction does to me seem grievous.
