Adventure Magazine Cover — page 163: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

— even those who try to look at something besides party or personal interest? For example, suppose some one were to urge a law, local, State or national, to the effect that no trees except nut-trees should be set out along any _ street or highway and that a certain percentage of new trees in parks must-be nut-trees. Our “‘states- men” would merely laugh—if they deigned to look at the proposition at all. Why should any one expect them to bother their massive brains over roadside trees when they have so many weighty problems to consider? And if it were urged that nuts have value as food they would, if they had the patience to talk about the trivial matter at all, tell you of the hundreds of more important crops and food industries that demanded prior attention. What. they would be really interested in, however, would be “‘policies” and politics, parties and party measures, abstract theories of economics and so on. Now consider the facis in this little proposal about nut-trees. To put the matter concretely and concisely, an authority has stated that if nut- trees were planted along all the highways of the country the resultant food production would in - twenty years equal in importance the entire live- stock industry of the United States. Think it over. Utilization of what is now waste land se far as actual production is concerned. Black, English and Japan walnuts, hickories, but- ternuts, filberts, pecans—all are good-looking trees or shrubs, all produce food values of highest quality. (Get a chemical analysis of these nuts in comparison with beefsteak and other meats and with our staple vegetables. You will find them out-ranking most of these familiar enes.) If the trees die they furnish wood of exceptional value, and there are various by-preducts also to be considered. And, roughly speaking, nut-trees require ne more care and at- tention, each in its proper region, than‘do ordinary shade-trees; far less than fruits. Also harvesting, storage and transportation aresimple matters com- pared te potatoes, fruits, meats, etc. JF ALL the highways could not be lined with nut- trees there is plenty of land, now unproductive and adopted to nething but timber, that is suitable for them and en which their planting could be urged and enceuraged. Indeed, people are even now beginning te realize that even good land planted to nuts is a good investment. If greater numbers would give rise to natural enemies it is as worth Looking Ahead for Democracy 153 Siintiettiiee these as it is to combat the greater hosts of pests that beset fruit. orchards, field crops and market gardens—and if the tree dies the wood alone, in most of the nuts, repays cost and labor and yields profit. There would, of course, have to be regulations as to harvesting and ownership when planted along roads or on public property, but cer- tainly it would be worth making and enforcing regulations if the value at stake were equal to even half or a tenth of the value of our livestock in- dustry. Think it over. practical and easy way of adding tremendously to our food production and our economic resources. UT it isn’t a “current issue” and it isn’t a subject on which most of the thinking has been done in large quantities by others, so of course our public men—politicians—have no time for it nor, not being - statesmen, any appreciation of its possibilities. And of course we the ‘people wouldn’t do anything about it ourselves. Not for a generation or two anyway. Like our politicians we have not the inclination to make the nation’s cause our personal cause nor have we been trained to consider the nation’s problems from a really scientific point of view. Our Departments of Agriculture, national and State, are well enough from the pseudo-scientific view-point and are often very “practical” in the narrow and common sense of the word. Perhaps they are not even behind the times. But they are certainly far, far from being real leaders of the times. And our politicians are good politicians, damnably » good, but they’re not statesmen. ‘The matter of planting nut-trees is merely a stray example of their lack of broad, far-seeing vision. Yet we leave all our national problems to be settled by them according to the Nictates of party politics. E American people need two things: (1) education in the responsibility, obligation and power of individual citizenship, and (2) better means of makihg the people’s opinions the decider of the people’s problems. ‘The people must rule and the people must be fit to rule. Our present system of elections and exaggerated party rule is extremely inadequate democracy. We suffer under many injustices as a result. The remedy does not lie in revolution by force but in securing by lawful democratic methods the real democracyjwe are supposed to have yet do not have. We can dothis. If we will.—A.S.H. -CoOmnico@OoKs ao It’s only common sense—a