Middlebury register. (Middlebury, Vt.) 1886-1937, 1901-08-02
SPIRIT OF THE PRESS
FACTS AND OPINIONS GATHERED
FROM CONTEMPORARIES
A LUMBER FAMINE.

LUMBER FAMINE.
Vermonters who own timber lots may
do well to hang on to them. They may
come to be of value as curiosities. At
any rate, the scientists are foretelling a
worldwide lumber famine. One of the
most eminent of these, DR.. Shick, re-
Gently made an address before the Lon
don Society of Arts on preservation of
forests which attracted worldwide at
tention. He showed that while con-
sumption in the four leading countries
of Europe has increased to fourteen
cubic feet per capita per annum, and
will soon reach twenty feet. the worlds
supply is rapidly diminishing.
If this supply dimishes as the demand
increases the ultimate result can be
nothing short of timber famine which
must effect the entire world. In this
country the great pine forests of the
North and Northwest are being denuded
of the finest timber the world every
produced with reckless disregard for the
future. There are other localities which
afford large supply, but if these forests
are cut into lumber as rapidly as have
the great pine areas of the North it will
not take many years to sweep them
clean.
Commenting upon the necessity for
government action in taking measures TO
develop new forest areas, an exchange
says:
Plainly the government which takes
steps to conserve its timber and develop
its forestry will profit in the end when
the demand of the world shall be made
upon the best prepared market. There
fore it is of greatest Importance to look
well after the young trees and take such
steps with government aid as will pre-
vent the ruthless destruction of timber
lands. The profits will be great, the
labor comparatively light"
The time is coming when the United
States will be called upon to supply
food and coal for the people of the old
world. We might as well by the adop-
ton of system of property throw in
lumber too while we are about it
Burlington News.
THE IRISH LANGUAGE.
Our language is the only thing that
remains to us after the struggles of
centuries. Our liberty and our own land
have been taken from us. While that
language remains it will ever act as
Masonic bond to link a people whom
misgovernment has eXiled all over the
globe, and who would otherwise be lost
to their country. Our national poet has
said 1.-The language of a nations youth
is the only easy and full speech for its
manhood, and tor its age, and when the
language of its cradle goes, itself Graves
tomb" And again: "a nation should
guard its language more than its terri
torles,-'tis surer barrier and
stronger frontier than fortress or river"
The language and the mind of Ireland
mutually reacted upon each other.
While the language was in the first in
stance the product, the growth, of the
Irish mind, leaving in its idioms and
forms Of expression distinct character
istics of the minds which envolve it, the
minds of future generations of Irishmen
were shaped and developed by the lam
guage, by its expressive beauty, its
prayerful and religious tendencies, its
mystic charms; they grew in the ma
tural order, forming, each one, a link in
the chain of national development, each
the inheritor of the wisdom, the culture,
and refinement of those preceding, each
drawing from the storehouse of the
past; and thus has been developed, not
in one generation, not by forced instruc-
ton, but by slow degrees, through
nearly twenty centuries, the Irish mind
and the Irish language. The Irish mind
was, even in pagan times, essentially
religious, chaste, and idealistic. docile,
dutiful to parents, passionately loyal
whether to earthly chief or heavenly
King, self-sacriticing and unselfish,-a
fitting soil on which to SOW the seeds of
Christianity, soil which has brought
real enduring fruit, not its semblance,
or the blossom, to decay on the appear
ance of the storm of self.interest or
self-indulgence. That mind with its
simplicity, it sincerity, and its devotion
to the cause of religion, has come down
to us unstained, in a language which
today, in the wilderness of irreligion,
moral depravity, selfishness, and NAM
mon-wcrshiD, speaks only of the
beauty of a simple life, relating tale
after tale to exemplify the worth of