The true northerner. [volume] (Paw Paw, Mich.) 1855-1920, 1884-04-17
ArbOr Day.

TRUE NoRrHERNER:
see by the proclamation of our governor,
in your columns that he respects the policy
of the state, not many years since inaugural
ed, to encourage the setting out of shade
trees, that the yards about buildings, and
the streets of our struggling villages, and
the highways threading around and among
our thousands of treeless farms, may be
rendered Eden-like by natures choicest or
nament of her otherwise bleak and inhospi-
table globe. 1t is very much To governor
Begole's credit that he endorses this policy
and urges the citizens of this state to OBJ
serve it. They say he is wealthy, and that
he made his wealth through the destruction
of pine forests, and the large profits obtain
able from their products. If this is true he
bears company with many others who might
be named, but the reflection arises as TO
what is the proportion of the repair that
''Arbor Day" will make to the terrible waste
that gives such men as Governor Begole their
wealth. We know of great cities in Central
and South America, fallen to ruins, with not
single inhabitant, and with mighty forests
growing upon them. We know Of mounds
that have been covered for generations, per-
haps ages, with forests, and from within the
ruined walls of the great palaces, nor from
y
who they were that built them, when they
were built, or why they were swept from the
face of the earth. But this we may GER
tainly learn from them that, in their day,
they were all "tree slayers," and, having
been overthrown by their own ruthlessness,
nature, obedient to her laws and the we'll
being of mankind, has replanted her forests,
making the region about the ruins and the
mounds once more habitable.
So in after-times, when the lumbermen--
big and lttle-and the tree-slayers of Mich
igan have made the state bleak waste, and
Governor Begole's palatial residence become
uninhabitable, and, with its neghbors, has
crumbled to ruins, nature will fall at work,
and plant again her trees.
The coming man, while roaming about
these forests, will stumble upon these ruins
and, perhaps, dig among the rubbish, and,
if safely preserved in some earthen jar he
shall find copy of the proclamation, he
will say, it reads as if the writer loved trees,
though he built and enlarged upon their
slaughter.
But, if the memory of the Governor may
be preserved, and kindly word dropped in
his behalf, how will it be- tell me Mr.. Editor,
if You can, with those miserable wretches
who cut into fire-wood or fence-posts, the
white and yellow oaks that nature plant
ed along the sandy, wearisome highways of
Van Buren, county?
The statute appropriates eight feet on
each side of the roadway to shade-trees, and
yet, these men remove those which nature OF
some kind hand before them has placed
within the limit, letting in the hot sun and
drying winds, TO speedily deepen the dust
and add to the labor of the poor horses that
YEARLY plod along, fetlock deep in the
loose earth. Assuredly. when their miser
able bones decay in the desert they have
assisted in creating, nothing ought to re
mind future generations of where they lie
or, if there be a reminder, n gnarled anC
hateful thorn bush should keep all kind,
disposed souls away from them.
Would il be too much 90 ask of sucl
beings that they should observe "Arbo