A HERITAGE OF MANKIND

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 19, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 47.

A HERITAGE OF MANKIND.

WHEN the biggest tree known to exist in the world was discovered in the mountains of Fresno County, Cal., the other day, the despatches announced that it would not be cut down because it was just inside a government reservation. The implication was that if it had been just outside it would have gone to the lumber mill—or rather a lumber mill would have gone to it.

Consider for a moment the full atrocity of such a crime. That tree is 350 feet high, and 51 feet in diameter six feet above the ground. It would have dwarfed the fallen Campanile of Venice both in height and in bulk, and when the Venetian bell-tower first looked out upon the Adriatic, a thousand years ago, the Sierran giant was already a hoary patriarch. It was a contemporary of the trees that masked the crater of Vesuvius before the pent-up fires burst forth upon Pompeii. It was flourishing in maturity when Pericles watched the building of the Parthenon, and it was a brother to the cedars of Lebanon that Hiram’s workmen wrought into the Temple of Solomon. But to a part of our advanced civilization its chief distinction is that it could be sawed into lumber enough to load five freight trains of fifty cars each.

The Campanile of Venice can be rebuilt, but a gardener who wished to duplicate a tree like that in California would have to sit up five thousand years to do it. Happily that particular tree is safe, but many others, hardly less majestic, have already been sacrificed to the doctrine that “a man may do what he likes with his own.” Is it not about time to set some limits to that doctrine, when doing what one likes with one’s own means inflicting irreparable loss upon mankind?—Thrice-a-Week World.