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 created to take its place.
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