It is a positive duty of a landed proprietor who
cuts down a tree which his grandfather planted, to put a young one
into the ground, as a legacy to his own grand-children: he will
otherwise leave the world worse than he found it. Sir Walter Scott,
who is himself a considerable planter, has eloquently denounced that
contracted feeling which prevents proprietors thus improving their
estates, because the profits of plantations make a tardy and distant
return; and we cannot better conclude than with a short passage from
the essay in which he enforces the duty of planting waste lands:--
"The indifference to this great rural improvement arises, we have
reason to believe, not so much out of the actual lucre of gain as the
fatal _vis inertiae_--that indolence which induces the lords of the
soil to be satisfied with what they can obtain from it by immediate
rent, rather than encounter the expense and trouble of attempting the
modes of amelioration which require immediate expense--and, what is,
perhaps, more grudged by the first-born of Egypt--a little future
attention. To such we can only say that the improvement by plantation
is at once the easiest, the cheapest, and the least precarious mode of
increasing the immediate value, as well as the future income, of their
estates; and that therefore it is we exhort them to take to heart the
exhortation of the dying Scotch laird to his son: 'Be aye sticking in
a tree Jock--it will be growing whilst you are sleeping.
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