The Holy Earth Part 9

In many places there are the forests. I think that we do not get the most out of them. Certainly they have two uses: one for the products, and one for the human relief and the inspiration. I should like to see a movement looking toward the better utilization of the forests humanly, as we use school buildings and church buildings and public halls. I wish that we might take our friends to the forests as we also take them to see the works of the masters. For this purpose, we should not go in large companies. We need sympathetic guidance. Parties of two and four may go separately to the forests to walk and to sit and to be silent. I would not forget the forest in the night, in the silence and the simplicity of the darkness. Strangely few are the people who know a real forest at dark. Few are those who know the forest when the rain is falling or when the snow covers the earth. Yet the forest is as real in all these moments as when the sun is at full and the weather is fair.

I wish that we might know the forest intimately and sensitively as a part of our background. I think it would do much to keep us close to the verities and the essentials.

_A forest background for a reformatory_

Some years ago I presented to a board that was charged with establis.h.i.+ng and maintaining a new State reformatory for wayward and delinquent boys an outline of a possible setting for the enterprise; and as this statement really const.i.tutes a practical application of some of the foregoing discussions, I present the larger part of it here. With delinquents it is specially important to develop the sense of obligation and responsibility, and I fear that we are endeavoring to stimulate this sense too exclusively by means of direct governing and disciplinary methods. The statement follows.

I think that the activities in the proposed reformatory should be largely agricultural and industrial. So far as possible the young men should be put into direct contact with realities and with useful and practical work. An effort should be made to have all this work mean something to them and not to be merely make-believe. It is fairly possible to develop such a property and organization as will put them in touch with real work rather than to force the necessity of setting tasks in order to keep them busy.

Aside from the manual labor part of it, the background of the reformatory should be such as will develop the feeling of responsibility in the workers. This means that they must come actually in contact with the raw materials and with things as they grow. When a young man has a piece of wood or metal given to him in a shop, his whole responsibility is merely to make something out of this material; he has no responsibility for the material itself, as he would have if he had been obliged to mine it or to grow it. One of the greatest advantages of a farm training is that it develops a man's responsibility toward the materials with which he works. He is always brought face to face with the problem of saving the fertility of the land, saving the crops, saving the forests, and saving the live-stock. The idea of saving and safeguarding these materials is only incidental to those who do not help to produce them.

It is important that the farm of this reformatory should be large enough so that all the young men may do some real pieces of work on it. Such a farm is not to be commercial in the ordinary farming sense. Its primary purpose is to aid in a reformative or educational process. You should, therefore, undertake such types of farming as will best serve those needs and best meet the abilities of the inmates. A very highly specialized farming, as the growing of truck-crops, would be quite impracticable as a commercial enterprise because this kind of farming demands the greatest skill and also because it requires a property very easily accessible to our great markets and, therefore, very expensive to procure and difficult to find in large enough acreage for an inst.i.tution of this size; and it is doubtful whether this type of farming would have the best effect on the inmates. Of course, I should expect that the inst.i.tution would try to grow its own vegetables, but it would probably be unwise to make truck-gardening the backbone of the farming enterprise. I also feel that it would not be best to make it primarily a dairy farm or a fruit farm or a poultry farm, although all these things should be well represented on the place and in sufficient extent to supply the inst.i.tution in whole or in part.

There should be such a farming enterprise as would give a very large and open background, part of it practically wild, and which would allow for considerable freedom of action on the part of the inmates. You should have operations perhaps somewhat in the rough and which would appeal to the manly qualities of the young men. It seems to me that a forestry enterprise would possibly be the best as the main part of the farming scheme.

If the reformatory could have one thousand acres of forest, the area would provide a great variety of conditions that the inmates would have to meet, it would give work in the building of roads and culverts and trails, it would provide winter activity at a time when the other farming enterprises are slack, it would bring the inmates directly in touch with wild and native life, and it would also place them against the natural resources in such a way as to make them feel their responsibility for the objects and the supplies.

Perhaps it will be impossible to secure one thousand acres of good timber in a more or less continuous area. However, it might be possible to a.s.semble a good number of contiguous farms in some of the hill regions so that one thousand acres of timber in various grades of maturity might be secured. There would be open s.p.a.ces which ought to be planted, and this of itself would provide good work and supervision. The tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, felling, and other care of this forest would be continuous.

The forest should not be stripped, but merely the merchantable or ready timber removed from year to year, and the domain kept in a growing and recuperating condition. One thousand acres of forest, in which timber is fit to be cut, should produce an annual increase of two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand board feet, and this increase should not lessen as the years go on. This timber should be manufactured. I have not looked into the question as to whether a market could be found for the materials that would be made from this timber, but I should suppose that a market could be as readily secured for this kind of manufacture as for any other. The educational and moral effect of seeing the material grow, then caring for it, then harvesting it, and then manufacturing it would be very great. One could follow the process from beginning to end and feel a responsibility for it in every stage. I should suppose that the manufacture would be of small work and not merely the sawing of lumber. It might be well to determine whether there would be market for chairs, cabinets, and other furniture, whip-stocks, or small material that could be used in the manufacture of novelties and other like articles. Possibly the reformatory could supply some of the stock to the prisons that are manufacturing furniture, although the educational and moral effects would be better if the inmates could see the process from beginning to end.

Of course, you would not limit the manufacturing activities of the reformatory to wood-working. You probably would be obliged to have other kinds of factories, but the wood-working shops ought to be part of the plan and I should hope a very important part.

I have not made any careful study of this question, and do not know how feasible these suggestions may be; but they appeal to me very strongly on the educational and reformational end. These suggestions are made only that they may be considered along with other suggestions, and if they seem to be worth while, to have the question investigated.

If something like one thousand acres of land were secured for a forest, it would mean that the farm itself would be rather large. There ought to be probably not less than two or three hundred acres of land that might be used for grazing, gardens, and the ordinary farm operations that would contribute to the support of the inmates of the inst.i.tution. Of course, this arable land ought to be valley land or at least fairly level and accessible along good public highways. The forest land could be more remote, running back on the hills. If the property could be so located that the forest would control the sources of important streams and springs, the results would be all the better. The young men should feel their responsibility for creeks and ponds, and for the protection of wild life as well as for the crops that they raise.

Where the reformatory should be located is a matter that should receive very careful attention. It is not alone the problem of finding a site that is proper for a reformatory, but also the question of so placing it that it will have some relation to State development and some connection with the people's interests and desires. State inst.i.tutions should be so separated that the greatest number of people may see them or come into contact with them. I dislike the tendency to group the State inst.i.tutions about certain populous centres. In these days of easy transportation, the carrying problem is really of less importance than certain less definite but none the less real relations to all the people. There are certain great areas in the State of considerable population in which there are no State inst.i.tutions, and in which the people know nothing about such affairs beyond the local school and church. Perhaps at first blush the people of a locality might not relish the idea of having a reformatory in their midst, but this feeling ought soon to pa.s.s away; and, moreover, the people should be made to feel their responsibility for reformatories, asylums, and penitentiaries as well as their responsibility for any other State inst.i.tutions, and the feeling should not be encouraged that such inst.i.tutions should be put somewhere else merely because one locality does not desire them.

The character of the property that is purchased will determine to a very large extent the character of the inst.i.tution, and, therefore, the nature of the reformatory processes. This is more important than transportation facilities. It is a more important question even than that of the proper buildings, for buildings for these purposes have been studied by many experts and our ideas concerning them have been more or less standardized and, moreover, buildings can be extended and modified more easily than can the landed area. It seems to me that before you think actually of purchasing the land, you should arrive at a fairly definite conclusion as to what kind of a farming enterprise it is desired to develop as a background for the inst.i.tution; you could then determine as far as possible on principle in what general region the inst.i.tution ought to be located; and then set out on a direct exploration to determine whether the proper kind and quant.i.ty of land can be secured.

_The background s.p.a.ces.--The open fields_

Here not long ago was the forest primeval. Here the trees sprouted, and grew their centuries, and returned to the earth. Here the midsummer brook ran all day long from the far-away places. Here the night-winds slept. Here havened the beasts and fowls when storms pursued them. Here the leaves fell in the glory of the autumn, here other leaves burst forth in the miracle of spring, and here the pewee called in the summer.

Here the Indian tracked his game.

It was not so very long ago. That old man's father remembers it. Then it was a new and holy land, seemingly fresh from the hand of the creator.

The old man speaks of it as of a golden time, now far away and hallowed; he speaks of it with an att.i.tude of reverence. "Ah yes," my father told me; and calmly with bared head he relates it, every incident so sacred that not one hairbreadth must he deviate. The church and the master's school and the forest,--these three are strong in his memory.

Yet these are not all. He remembers the homes cut in the dim wall of the forest. He recalls the farms full of stumps and heaps of logs and the ox-teams on them, for these were in his boyhood. The ox-team was a natural part of the slow-moving conquest in those rugged days. Roads betook themselves into the forest, like great serpents devouring as they went. And one day, behold! the forest was gone. Farm joined farm, the village grew, the old folk fell away, new people came whose names had to be asked.

And I thought me why these fields are not as hallowed as were the old forests. Here are the same knolls and hills. In this turf there may be still the fibres of ancient trees. Here are the paths of the midsummer brooks, but vocal now only in the freshets. Here are the winds. The autumn goes and the spring comes. The pewee calls in the groves. The farmer and not the Indian tracks the plow.

Here I look down on a little city. There is a great school in it. There are spires piercing the trees. In the distance are mills, and I see the smoke of good accomplishment roll out over the hillside. It is a self-centred city, full of pride. Every mile-post praises it. Toward it all the roads lead. It tells itself to all the surrounding country. And yet I cannot but feel that these quiet fields and others like them have made this city; but I am glad that the fields are not proud.

One day a boy and one day a girl will go down from these fields, and out into the thoroughways of life. They will go far, but these hills they will still call home.

From these uplands the waters flow down into the streams that move the mills and that float the s.h.i.+ps. Loads of timber still go hence for the construction down below. Here go building-stones and sand and gravel,--gravel from the glaciers. Here goes the hay for ten thousand horses. Here go the wheat, and here the apples, and the animals. Here are the votes that hold the people steady.

Somewhere there is the background. Here is the background. Here things move slowly. Trees grow slowly. The streams change little from year to year, and yet they shape the surface of the earth in this hill country.

In yonder fence-row the catbird has built since I was a boy, and yet I have wandered far and I have seen great changes in yonder city. The well-sweep has gone but the well is still there: the wells are gone from the city. The cows have changed in color, but still they are cows and yield their milk in season. The fields do not perish, but time eats away the city. I think all these things must be good and very good or they could not have persisted in all this change.

In the beginning! Yes, I know, it was holy then. The forces of eons shaped it: still was it holy. The forest came: still holy. Then came the open fields.

_The background s.p.a.ces.--The ancestral sea_

The planet is not all land, and the sea is as holy as the soil. We speak of the "waste of waters," and we still offer prayers for those who go down to the sea in s.h.i.+ps.

Superst.i.tion yet clings about the sea. The landsman thinks of the sea as barren, and he regrets that it is not solid land on which he may grow gra.s.s and cattle. And as one looks over the surface of the waters, with no visible object on the vast expanse and even the clouds lying apparently dead and sterile, and when one considers that three-fourths of the earth's surface is similarly covered, one has the impression of utter waste and desolation, with no good thing abiding there for the comfort and cheer of man.

The real inhabitants of the sea are beneath the surface and every part is tenanted, so completely tenanted that the ocean produces greater bulk of life, area for area, than does the solid land; and every atom of this life is as keen to live and follows as completely the law of its existence as does the life of the interiors of the continents. The vast meadows of plankton and nekton, albeit largely of organisms microscopic, form a layer for hundreds of feet beneath the surface and on which the great herbivora feed; and on these animals the legions of the carnivora subsist. Every vertical region has its life, peculiar to it, extending even to the bottoms of the depths in the world-slimes and the darkness; and in these deeps the falling remains of the upper realms, like gentle primeval rains, afford a never-failing, never-ending source of food and maintain the slow life in the bottoms. We think of the huge animals of the sea when we think of ma.s.s, and it is true that the great whales are the bulkiest creatures we know to have lived; yet it is the bacteria, the desmids, the minute crustaceans, and many other diminutive forms that everywhere populate the sea from the equator to the poles and provide the vast background of the ocean life. In these gulfs of moving unseen forms nitrification proceeds, and the rounds of life go on unceasingly. The leviathan whale strains out these minute organisms from the volumes of waters, and so full of them may be his maw that his captors remove the acc.u.mulation with spades. The rivers bring down their freight of mud and organic matter, and supply food for the denizens of the sea. The last remains of all these mult.i.tudes are laid down on the ocean floors as organic oozes; and n.o.body knows what part the abysmal soil may play in the economy of the plant in some future epoch.

The rains of the land come from the sea; the clouds come ultimately from the sea; the trade-winds flow regularly from the sea; the temperatures of the land surface are controlled largely from the sea; the high lands are washed into the sea as into a basin; if all the continents were levelled into the sea still would the sea envelop the planet about two miles deep. Impurities find their way into the sea and are there digested into the universal beneficence. We must reckon with the sea.

It is supposed that the first life on the earth came forth where the land and the waters join, from that eternal interplay of cosmic forces where the solid and the fluid, the mobile and the immobile, meet and marry.

Verily, the ancestral sea is the background of the planet. Its very vastness makes it significant. It shows no age. Its deeps have no doubt existed from the solidification of the earth and they will probably remain when all works of man perish utterly.

The sea is the bosom of the earth's mysteries. Because man cannot set foot on it, the sea remains beyond his power to modify, to handle, and to control. No breach that man may make but will immediately fill; no fleets of mighty s.h.i.+ps go down but that the sea covers them in silence and knows them not; man may not hold converse with the monsters in the deeps. The sea is beyond him, surpa.s.sing, elemental, and yet blessing him with abundant benedictions.

So vast is the sea and so self-recuperating that man cannot sterilize it. He despoils none of its surface when he sails his s.h.i.+ps. He does not annihilate the realms of plankton, lying layer on layer in its deluging, consuming soil. It controls him mightily.

The seas and the sh.o.r.es have provided the trading ways of the peoples.

The ocean connects all lands, surrounds all lands. Until recent times the great marts have been mostly on coasts or within easy water access of them. The polity of early settlements was largely the polity of the sea and the strand. The daring of the navigator was one of the first of the heroic human qualities. Probably all dry land was once under the sea, and therefrom has it drawn much of its power.

From earliest times the sea has yielded property common to all and free to whomever would take it,--the fish, the wrack, the drift, the salvage of s.h.i.+ps. Pirates have roamed the sea for spoil and booty. When government appropriates the wreckage of s.h.i.+ps and the stranded derelict of the sea, the people may think it justifiable protection of their rights to secrete it. Smuggling is an old sea license. Laws and customs and old restraints lose their force and vanish on the sea; and freedom rises out of the sea.

And so the ocean has contributed to the making of the outlook of the human family. The race would be a very different race had there been no sea stretching to the unknown, conjuring vague fears and stimulating hopes, bringing its freight, bearing tidings of far lands, sundering traditions, rolling the waves of its elemental music, driving its rank smells into the nostrils, putting its salt into the soul.