Importance and Possibility of Physical Restoration

Many circumstances conspire to invest with great present interest the questions: how far man can permanently modify and ameliorate those physical conditions of terrestrial surface and climate on which his material welfare depends; how far he can compensate, arrest, or retard the deterioration which many of his agricultural and industrial processes tend to produce; and how far he can restore fertility and salubrity to soils which his follies or his crimes have made barren or pestilential. Among these circumstances, the most prominent, perhaps, is the necessity of providing new homes for a European population which is increasing more rapidly than its means of subsistence, new physical comforts for classes of the people that have now become too much enlightened and have imbibed too much culture to submit to a longer deprivation of a share in the material enjoyments which the privileged ranks have hitherto monopolized.

To supply new hives for the emigrant swarms, there are, first, the vast unoccupied prairies and forests of America, of Australia, and of many other great oceanic islands, the sparsely inhabited and still unexhausted soils of Southern and even Central Africa, and, finally, the impoverished and half-depopulated shores of the Mediterranean, and the interior of Asia Minor and the farther East. To furnish to those who shall remain after emigration shall have conveniently reduced the too dense population of many European states, those means of sensuous and of intellectual well-being which are styled "artificial wants" when demanded by the humble and the poor, but are admitted to be "necessaries" when claimed by the noble and the rich, the soil must be stimulated to its highest powers of production, and man's utmost ingenuity and energy must be tasked to renovate a nature drained, by his improvidence, of fountains which a wise economy would have made plenteous and perennial sources of beauty, health, and wealth.

In those yet virgin lands which the progress of modern discovery in both hemispheres has brought and is still bringing to the knowledge and control of civilized man, not much improvement of great physical conditions is to be looked for. The proportion of forest is indeed to be considerably reduced, superfluous waters to be drawn off, and routes of internal communication to be constructed; but the primitive geographical and climatic features of these countries ought to be, as far as possible, retained.