["Each state has been the country of its citizens, a country not seldom larger in itself than France or Germany. Of all these countries, over a vast region the people declare the Union is no longer advantageous to them. And all this, as the Oxford professor of international law has well observed, “ in a country which has treasured the right of revolt as the charter of its own freedom, and regarded the exercise of it as restrained only by motives of prudence, and needing no public justification except out of ‘a decent respect for the opinions of mankind;’ a country- the only one in the world which has made the theory of a social compact the basis of its institutions; which was the first to promulgate formally the doctrine that ‘all just governments derive their power from the consent of the governed,’ and has never ceased to applaud every application of that doctrine abroad, nor to teach and proclaim it at home.
So the case stands, and under all the passion of parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many many other evils."]

Mr Dickens was very astute. It would seem he could look into the forest and find the majestic victims of large masses of misteltoe. That parasitic, (but not threatening in appearance to the uninformed observer ) greenery that chokes the life from trees that otherwise are productive, stately and considered worth protecting.

His observations cut through the lower, but at times more obvious foliage and see clearly the reason the trees had defenders and those defenders were willing to do whatever it took to protect them from an invasion. It's a shame those concerned with the fate of those trees couldn't state it more clearly than he did.

Pam