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5TATL OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 OFFICL 5UPE.RINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION 
 
 CON5E.RVATION 
 
 OF 
 
 NATURAL RESOURCES 
 
 It is safe to say that the prosperity of our people depends directly on the energy 
 and intelligence with which our natural resources are used. It is equally clear 
 that these resources are the final basis of natural power and perpetuity. Finally, 
 it is ominously evident that these resources are in the course of rapid exhaustion. 
 
 FROM THE 
 
 TWENTY-THIRD BILNNIAL REPORT 
 
 EDWARD HYATT 
 
 5UPLRINTENDLNT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION 
 
 J 
 
 SACRAMLNTO. CALIFORNIA 
 1909 
 

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 PRINTED AT THE STATE PRINTING OFFICE 
 W. W. SHANNON, SUPERINTENDENT. 
 
 
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 CONSERVATION OF NATURAL 
 RESOURCES. 
 
 Introductory by the Superintendent of Public Instruction. 
 
 WORD TO THE PEOPLE OF CALIFORNIA. 
 My friends, during the past year I have become 
 possessed by the idea that the largest, the most 
 truly patriotic, the most vitally important move- 
 ment in this nation to-day is the one looking to the 
 Conservation of our Natural Resources. This has 
 been large enough to call together a Conference of 
 Governors, to cause the appointment of a National 
 Commission, and to engage the earnest attention, 
 the gravest concern of the greatest and most bril- 
 liant minds of our continent. It is patriotic, for 
 it looks to the preservation of our fatherland into 
 the future with its power and glory undimmed. 
 It is vitally important, for without it our nation is doomed to go down 
 to poverty and weakness. It is unselfish, for it looks forward to the 
 welfare of. those who come after us, rather than for our own little per- 
 sonal benefit now. It is a vital and a worthy thing, however we view it. 
 I have become possessed by the idea, too, that it is highly important 
 for the school people of this State to join in this movement ; for them 
 to grasp its significance, appreciate its momentum, take hold of it 
 strongly and intelligently. Such a movement as this must fail unless 
 it can be projected into the future. It can only be projected into the 
 future through the children of the nation. If it would really get per- 
 manently into the hearts of the People, it must filter through the 
 Children. 
 
 I conceive it to be a patriotic duty resting upon every teacher, every 
 superintendent, every school officer, to take his share of responsibility 
 in this thing; to read, to talk, to think, to inform himself about this 
 great movement for Conservation — and then to pass the spirit of it all 
 along to the Children. In no other state or country is such variety and 
 wealth of natural resources to be found as in California. Nowhere else 
 is it being squandered with such careless hand, nor is there elsewhere 
 such necessity for wise and thoughtful and far-seeing School People. 
 
The«e: i^cJg-^op.^ impel m^ to , collect from letters, talks, newspapers, 
 magazines, ttis little handbook of Conservation. It is meant to be read. 
 It is meant to give a notion of what people are thinking and saying 
 about the subject. It is meant to attract the attention of the school 
 people of California, to give them some means for measuring the 
 importance of the movement, some materials for shaping the sentiments 
 of themselves and their children. It is only a start. I hope it can be 
 accepted as a start in the right direction, and that it may lead toward 
 good citizenship and the general weal. 
 Very truly yours, 
 
 EDWARD HYATT. 
 
5 — 
 
 THE CASE OUTLINED. 
 
 What Does It Mean? 
 
 Just what does it mean — this Conservation of Natural Resources? 
 Why, it means simply the wise care and use of our forests, our mines, 
 our water, our soil. These are the fundamental sources of wealth that 
 have been given to us by nature. 
 
 Why Are We Great? 
 
 Why is our nation one of the greatest in all the world ? Is it because 
 we are stronger people, better people than the rest of the world? Not 
 at all. It all rests upon the wonderful, the amazing natural resources 
 of North America. The great fortunes, the great cities, the great 
 achievements of this nation, past and future, all depend upon our 
 natural resources. 
 
 Where Does Our Money Come From? 
 
 Whence comes the money of the thousands of rich Americans who 
 set all Europe agape? Whence come the funds to construct the great 
 sky-scrapers, to rebuild ruined cities, to make fleets of warships, trans- 
 continental railroads, interoceanic canals and the other titanic under- 
 takings that we are continually carrying out ? 
 
 From Our Natural Storehouses. 
 
 It all comes from American copper, or wheat or lumber or coal or 
 oil or gas or iron ; or from the railroads or ships hauling these things ; 
 or from trading with the people who work in these things ; or from the 
 utilities of the cities that grow upon these things. Everything in all 
 our power and civilization and luxury goes straight back to our natural 
 storehouses of wealth. And we got them so easily that we do not even 
 appreciate them as yet. 
 
 Suppose They Were Gone? 
 
 But suppose these storehouses were gone, or nearly empty? What 
 would American enterprise amount to if it had nothing to exploit? 
 What figure does a poverty-stricken nation cut in the world? What 
 rich and populous nations in history have not gone down into groveling 
 insignificance by squandering their natural resources? 
 
 Unthinking Babes. 
 
 Up to date we have been careless, heedless children with all our 
 resources, giving them away, destroying them, wasting them with lavish 
 hands, and with no thought of the morrow. He who can destroy most 
 
of our public property in the shortest time most excites our childish 
 admiration. We have been busily playing our little games, paying no 
 attention while some of the boys have set the house afire. 
 
 Something Is Doing. 
 
 But now an awakening seems to be coming. Its first tangible appear- 
 ance was a Conference of Governors of the states and territories of the 
 United States at the White House in Washington, presided over by 
 President Roosevelt. Very many of the wisest and ablest men of the 
 United States took part in this Conference — statesmen, philosophers, 
 captains of industry. The Conference was followed in June by the 
 formation of a National Conservation Commission of forty-eight mem- 
 bers, appointed by the President. 
 
 The General Plan. 
 
 This National Commission is now at work. It is the plan that many 
 commissions and associations throughout the states of the Union shall 
 be formed to work with it, either upon Conservation as a whole or upon 
 some phase of the subject vital to the particular locality. The results 
 of this work are to be reported from time to time to the state legislatures 
 and to the United States Congress ; and made the basis for a wide and 
 harmonious system of laws governing our Natural Resources. 
 
 But this wise and patriotic plan will fall down utterly, will come to 
 naught, will turn to ashes in our grasp — unless it can he hacked up^ 
 supported, urged on hy a strong, stern, unsleeping Puhlic Opinion. 
 
 Therefore It Is. 
 
 Therefore it is that the matter must be carried to the people, to the 
 teachers, to the children. They must learn the facts and form their 
 sentiments and see their duty. Commissions and legislatures will 
 accomplish nothing unless we can wake the patriotic spirit of the 
 people. The movement for Conservation can go no further than public 
 opinion will carry it; but it will go fully as far as public opinion 
 will go. [E. H.] 
 
 Aristotle says, "All who have meditated on the 
 art of governing mankind have been convinced that 
 the fate of empires depends on the education of 
 youth." 
 
— 7 
 
 THE NATIONAL CONSERVATION COMMISSION. 
 
 This body is composed of forty-eight eminent men of the United 
 States. California is represented by Senator Frank P. Flint and 
 Ex-Governor Pardee. Others are familiar names, as Senator Burton 
 of Ohio, Dolliver of Iowa, Beveridge of Indiana, Champ Clark of 
 Missouri, Nelson of Minnesota, John Mitchell, Andrew Carnegie, Presi- 
 dent Van Hise, John Hays Hammond. The headquarters is at Wash- 
 ington. The President and the Secretary have examined the plan and 
 purpose of these pages and have expressed approving sentiments in 
 the following letters: 
 
 WASHINGTON, Nov. 6, 1908. 
 
 To the Superintendent of Public Instruction, 
 
 Sacramento, California. 
 My dear sir! 
 
 I hasten to express my gratification over 
 the excellent way in which you have worked 
 out your idea of devoting a part of your 
 biennial Report to Conservation. It is 
 thoroughly admirable, and I. am sure will do 
 a great deal toward making the volume a very 
 effective agency for good. You have discov- 
 ered a new, and, I am convinced, extremely 
 powerful channel for the advancement of the 
 movement. I congratulate you upon having 
 perceived this opportunity to promote educa- 
 tion, and again congratulate you on being 
 able so effectively to put your idea into 
 execution. I shall appreciate any opportu- 
 nity to assist you in the project. 
 Very truly yours, 
 
 GIFFORD PINCHOT, 
 
 Chairman. 
 
WASHINGTON, Dec. 18, 1908. 
 
 The Supt . of Public Instruction, 
 
 Sacramento, Gal. 
 My dear sir: 
 
 You are the first State officer, of whom 
 I have any knowledge, to take up Conserva- 
 tion in the way you propose to treat it, in 
 your Report. I believe that your action 
 will be the opening wedge in this great 
 movement among the teachers of the whole 
 country. I congratulate you on your concep- 
 tion of the idea, and I hope you will feel 
 perfectly free to call upon the Commission 
 for any additional assistance which you may 
 desire. Will you not kindly keep me in 
 touch with the progress of your Report, and 
 believe me. 
 
 Very sincerely yours, 
 
 THOMAS R. SHIPP, 
 
 Secretary. 
 
WHAT PEOPLE ARE 
 THINKING. 
 
 THIS movement is so new 
 that many of us do not yet 
 appreciate its momentum. 
 Most of us never even heard of 
 it until within the last few 
 months. Nothing can give us a 
 better idea of it, perhaps, and 
 nothing can be more interesting 
 than to see what other people 
 are really thinking and saying 
 about it; particularly so if the 
 other people are ones we respect 
 or ones who have had unusual 
 opportunity to know what they 
 are talking about. With this in 
 view the following expressions 
 of individual opinion have been 
 collected. 
 
 These can be used by a clever 
 teacher in many ways. For in- 
 stance, in the morning exercises, 
 one can be read aloud by a pupil, 
 or explained by the teacher. 
 Another may be given as a dec- 
 lamation or a reading at some 
 entertainment or patriotic cele- 
 bration. Still another, perhaps, 
 w^ll yield quotations and strong 
 points for debates, essays and 
 other similar school activities. 
 
 Of course, if the spirit does 
 not move the teacher to use these 
 things, they all fall flat. But 
 California teachers never lack 
 for spirit. 
 
 A bit of our forest. 
 
— 10 — 
 
 The President of the United States. 
 
 ''The necessity for a comprehensive and systematic improvement of 
 our waterAvays, the preservation of our soil and of our forests, the 
 securing from private appropriation the power in navigable streams, 
 the retention of the undisposed of coal lands of the Government from 
 alienation, all will properly claim from the next Administration earnest 
 attention and appropriate legislation. 
 
 Without the resources which make labor productive, American enter- 
 prise, energy, and skill would not in the past have been able to make 
 headway against hard conditions. Our children and their children 
 will not be able to make headway if we leave to them an impoverished 
 country. Our land, our waters, our forests, and our minerals are the 
 sources from which come directly or indirectly the livelihood of all 
 of us. The conservation of our natural resources is a question of 
 fundamental importance to the United States now. 
 
 The truth is that the overwhelming necessity for our doing something 
 to conserve our natural resources is going to put us to a new test of the 
 practical character of our system of government. It is going to involve 
 the question of whether, with the changing conditions, with the closer 
 relations and the interdependence of the various parts of this country, 
 our National Constitution will furnish the means of meeting that neces- 
 sity. Now, I have no doubt that it will. ' ' 
 
 Wm. ir. Taft. 
 
 A Famous Churchman. 
 
 "No policy of our National Government is more in keeping with 
 those democratic principles upon which our Republic is founded than 
 the conservation of our natural resources, and none is to have a greater 
 influence upon the future prosperity of our land. Our fertile soils, 
 our inland waters, our mines, and our forests are God-given heritages 
 which belong no more to the present generation than to generations 
 that are to come. It is our duty as American citizens to regard these 
 resources as sacred trusts, to preserve them, and to use them wisel}^ 
 and with moderation, that we may, as far as possible, provide against 
 the days of want that are surely approaching; and that when these 
 days are at hand they may not come as a crushing retribution. l)ut as 
 a wholesome discipline by which we shall be taught the great lessorjs 
 of thrift and foresight." 
 
 Cardinal Gibbons. 
 
 The Great Commoner. 
 
 ' ' It should be our purpose, not only to preserve the nation 's resources 
 for future generations by reducing waste to a minimum; we should see 
 to it that a few of the people do not monopolize that which in equity is 
 the property of all the people. The earth belongs to each generation, 
 
— 11 — 
 
 and it is as criminal to fetter future generations with perpetual fran- 
 chises, making the multitude servants to a favored faction of the 
 population, as it would be to impair, unnecessarily, the common store. 
 
 Money spent in care for the life and health of the people, in pro- 
 tecting the soil from erosion and from exhaustion, in preventing waste 
 in the use of minerals of limited supply, in the reclamation of deserts 
 and swamps, and in the preservation of forests still remaining and 
 the planting of denuded tracts — money invested in these and in the 
 development of waterways and in the deepening of harbors is an 
 investment jdelding an annual return. If any of these expenditures 
 fail to bring a return at once the money expended is like a bequest to 
 those who come after us. And as the parent lives for his child as well 
 as for himself, so the good citizen provides for* the future as well as 
 for the present." 
 
 William Jennings Bryan. 
 
 The President of the University of California. 
 
 ' ' This small revolving globe we dwell upon has been used as a home by 
 us humans, by us and our ancestors, for a goodly row of centuries. But 
 we were too few and weak to master it and put it clean beneath our feet. 
 It mostly got the best of us. Of late we have come to get the best of it. 
 It used to thwart us, and steer us, and tell us what we must do. Now 
 we tell it what we want to do, and make it do it for us. We have 
 fettered its strengths with steel and made them work for us. We force 
 its down-hill waters to carry us up hill. We use its own treasures of 
 fuel to belittle its size and dignity ; to curb it and humble it, and even 
 to reshape it. 
 
 This is all very well, but of late men have been finding this robbing 
 and humiliating of the prostrate body of nature so easy and so interest- 
 ing as to make it a form of sport. They rob and exploit without refer- 
 ence to any present need, just to show what they can do. It is like the 
 killing of the buffaloes for the fun of shooting, until all at once it 
 appeared they were practically exterminated. 
 
 This generation will have for one thing at least a great name in 
 history. Men of the future centuries will surely call it the generation of 
 the great destroyers, and historians and economists will write of the 
 riotous days of nineteen hvmdred, when the people used up all the 
 petroleum, all the natural gas, all the anthracite and most of the other 
 coal, and most of the handy iron. It will be the period when the forests 
 were cut down or burnt up, the lands stolen, and the waters given away. 
 We are sure to be the subject of earnest remark. ' ' 
 
 Benjamin Ide Wheeler. 
 
— 12 — 
 
 The Secretary of the Interior. 
 
 * ' Why should a great resource, which is owned by the people at large. 
 be used by private interests, by somebody that is looking only to his 
 own benefit, and not to the benefit of the people of the country? The 
 people as a whole own these natural resources. They are not divided. 
 But the people as a whole, as I say, own them, and it is for them to 
 determine whether those resources shall be used for the benefit of all, 
 or shall be turned over to be used unregulated for the benefit of those 
 who may perchance first get a foothold in any special locality. In any 
 law that is passed, in any theory of disposition that is adopted, we 
 must look not only to their conservation and use, but we must look to 
 the prevention of their monopolization in the hands of a few favored 
 interests." James R. Garfield. 
 
 A Great Labor Leader. 
 ''In our mad rush for spoils and profits we not only waste and 
 destroy those material resources with which God has so bountifully 
 endowed us, but we press forward in the race, sacrificing, unnecessarily, 
 the lives and the comfort of our fellow-beings. It seems to me that 
 the time has come when we should stop for a moment and think — not 
 alone of those inanimate things that make for comfort and prosperity, 
 but also of the men, and the women, and the children, whose toil and 
 deprivation have made and will continue to make our country and our 
 people the most progressive and the most intelligent of all the nations 
 and of all the peoples of the earth. ' ' John Mitchell. 
 
 A California College President. 
 
 "The greatest results of the administration of President Roosevelt 
 have been twofold: the awakening of the civic conscience in our country, 
 and the movement towards the conservation of our natural resources. 
 These two results are closely connected, and each movement strengthens 
 the other. There is now nothing in American politics of greater prac- 
 tical importance than the preservation of our national domain, with 
 all that it contains, and all this developed to the highest point of 
 efficiency. 
 
 Of these elements, that of forest preservation now stands first in 
 pressing importance and deserves the constant support of all good men. 
 Very important is also the preservation of the birds, to which the 
 Audubon societies are dedicated. The saving of the fisheries is likewise 
 a matter of large moment to the future and in this I am giving per- 
 sonally all the help I can. 
 
 As for the waters, soils and all such matters, our many centers of 
 investigation and instruction in agriculture are giving splendid pledges 
 for the future." David Starr Jordan. 
 
— 13 — 
 
 The Ex- President of the United States. 
 
 '* In utilizing and conserving the natural resources of the nation the 
 one characteristic more essential than any other is foresight. Unfor- 
 tunately, foresight is not usually characteristic of a young and vigorous 
 people, and it is obviously not a marked characteristic of us in the 
 United States. Yet assuredly it should be the growing nation with a 
 future which takes the long look ahead ; and no other nation is growing 
 so rapidly as ours or has a future so full of promise. No other nation 
 enjoys so wonderful a measure of present prosperity which can of 
 right be treated as an earnest of future success, and in no other are 
 the rewards of foresight so great, so certain, and so easily foretold. 
 Yet hitherto as a nation we have tended to live with an eye single to 
 the present, and have permitted the reckless waste and destruction of 
 much of our natural wealth. 
 
 The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use con- 
 stitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other 
 problem of our national life. Unless we maintain an adequate material 
 basis for our civilization, we can not maintain the institutions in which 
 we take so great and just a pride ; and to waste and destroy our natural 
 resources means to undermine this material basis. ' ' 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt. 
 
 A Famous Ex- President. 
 
 ''Those most proudly happy in their sanguine Americanism, and 
 most confident of our ability to accomplish all things, must confess that 
 our national life has been habitually beset with careless wastefulness, 
 and that a palpable manifestation of this wastefulness is seen in the 
 destruction of tree growth and the denudation of watersheds on our 
 Western lands. Laws passed with the professed intent of protecting 
 our forests have been so amiably construed as to admit of easy invasion ; 
 and their execution has too often been lax and perfunctory. In the 
 mean time, public opinion on this subject, which might be as effective 
 as legal enactment, has comfortably slumbered. 
 
 Even if we now abjectly repent of our sins of omission and commis- 
 sion in our treatment of the forests and streams which nature has given 
 us, and reproach ourselves for the neglect of a trust imposed on us for 
 the benefit of future generations, we must at the same time humbly 
 confess that the punishment we have suffered by flood, by drought, by 
 tornado, by fire, by barrenness of soil, and by loss of timber value^ 
 is well deserved. 
 
 In these circumstances it is exceedingly gratifying to have an appro- 
 priate opportunity to congratulate those who have constantly labored 
 in the cause of forestry and forest preservation, as well as those inter- 
 ested in the cognate subject of irrigation, upon the prospect that these 
 topics are to have more prominent places in governmental care. 
 
— 14 — 
 
 Through the teachings of intelligent forestry it has been made plain 
 that in our Western localities ruinous floods and exhausting droughts 
 can be largely prevented, and productive moisture in useful degree and 
 at needed periods secured, by a reasonable and discriminating preserva- 
 tion of our forest areas; the advocates of irrigation have been led to 
 realize that it is useless to provide for the storage of water unless the 
 sources of its supply are protected ; and all those who, in a distinterested 
 way, have examined these questions concede that tree growth and nat- 
 ural soil on our watersheds are more valuable to the masses of our 
 people than the footprints of sheep or cattle. 
 
 The opportune time has arrived when effective public interest in 
 forestry and forest preservation should be persistently aroused and 
 stimulated. ' ' 
 
 Grover Cleveland in 1904. 
 
 A Famous Mining Engineer. 
 ''The ever-increasing rapidity of exploitation consequent upon the 
 exigencies of niodern engineering and economic practice inevitably 
 leads to an alarming diminution of the lives — if I may use that term — 
 of our mineral products. The culmination of our mining industry is 
 to be reckoned by decades, and its declension (if not practically its 
 economic exhaustion) in generations, not in centuries." 
 
 John Hays Hammond. 
 
 An American Political Economist. 
 "If we want to "prolong American prosperity and maintain the high 
 level of American wages, our wage being double that of the other 
 nations of the earth, we must protect our facilities and enlarge our 
 ability to produce and manufacture the things that we manufacture 
 at the lowest cost. * * * If we had no advantage in the marketing 
 of our goods, either in excellence or quantity or cheapness of produc- 
 tion, it simply would mean that American labor would be reduced to the 
 labor of all other nations of the world, and if we want to maintain its 
 high level we must protect the facilities that will enable us to produce 
 our goods at the very lowest possible cost." 
 
 William S. Harvey. 
 
 The State Geologist of West Virginia. 
 ''Just as sure as the sun shines, and the sum of two and two is four, 
 unless this insane riot of destruction and waste of our fuel resources 
 which has characterized the past century shall be speedily ended, our 
 industrial power and supremacy will, after a meteor-like existence, 
 revert', before the close of the present century, to those nations that 
 conserve and prize at their proper value their priceless treasures of 
 carbon. " < T. 0. White. 
 
— 15 — . • 
 
 A Captain of the Steel Industry. 
 
 ''We are nationally in the position of a large family receiving a rich 
 patrimony from thrifty parents deceased intestate. * * * Now, the 
 first duty of such a family is to take stock of its patrimony; the next 
 to manage the assets in such manner that none shall be wasted, that 
 all be put to the greatest good of the living and their descendants. ' ' 
 
 Andrev^ Carnegie. 
 
 The Governor of California. 
 
 ' ' Certainly this great nation must conserve the foundations of its pros- 
 perity if it would continue great. And certainly no state is more inter- 
 ested in the matter than California. Resources of every kind have been 
 richly given to us — great forests, splendid soils, plentiful waters, valu- 
 able mines. It is no more than ordinary business prudence for us to 
 take stock of our inheritances and find out the best way to handle them 
 in future. Our children have a right to demand that we pass this great 
 property on to them unimpaired, so that they and their children's 
 children may continue to live and to prosper. ' ' 
 
 J. N. GiLLETT. 
 The Governor of Utah. 
 "The great, broad principle underlying the subject of conservation 
 is whether or not each succeeding generation can be sustained on the 
 land without impoverishing it in any respect. Stated as a question 
 it is, ' Will each generation have the land as rich as the preceding one ? ' 
 It seems a simple question, and yet the safety and the lives of our 
 children and our children 's children will depend upon the answer. The 
 forests, the streams, the soil, the minerals, and all the other natural 
 elements of wealth should remain as nearly as possible undiminished 
 as the centuries pass. All of this is in the hands of the people, with 
 the possible exception of the preservation of the mineral wealth. ' ' 
 
 Cutter. 
 
 The Governor of New Jersey. 
 
 ''A lumber famine is dangerously near. Steep mountain sides are 
 deforested for a few poor years of farming, and then abandoned, and 
 their native fertility goes to choke the rivers and form bars in every 
 harbor along the coast. The streams themselves become inactive and 
 a large part of their power is wasted. The ills that come from this 
 condition can be remedied by Government action alone, but that action 
 must be taken now or we shall be staggered by the cost. ' ' 
 
 Stokes. 
 
 The Governor of Oregon. 
 
 ' ' The conservation of the water supply is absolutel}^ dependent upon 
 the preservation of the upland forests. Opposition to the policy comes 
 not from those interested in the development of the country and the 
 
— 16 — 
 
 perpetuation of our institutions, but from the predatory classes, who 
 care for naught but temporary gain. ' ' 
 
 Chamberlain. 
 
 The Governor of Idaho. 
 
 "We have built here a great nation, without a thought of to-morrow. 
 We will grow still greater, even if we follow the same old methods that 
 we have followed in the past. But we can not reach our full share of 
 greatness as a nation unless, before it is too late, we throw safeguards 
 around those resources that have made us the mightiest nation on the 
 earth, so that they can be preserved and protected, that they may be 
 developed to the greatest extent for the benefit of this and future gen- 
 erations. ' ' 
 
 Gooding. 
 
 The Governor of New York. 
 
 ' ' The question of preserving our forests is of vital importance, and I 
 am most anxious that all proper measures to this end shall be taken. 
 * * * I am in hearty sympathy with the object. ' ' 
 
 Hughes. 
 
 
 Wasteful lumbering. Wreckage of a Western forest after logging. The fire 
 has already begun on it. What a boon a few square feet of this ground 
 would be even now to many a family. The time is coming when every 
 splinter of it will be keenly needed ; its waste bitterly regretted. Millions 
 upon millions of acres like this go up in smoke. 
 
— 17 — 
 
 The Governor of Massachusetts. 
 
 ''Not merely the lumber supply, but water power and water supply 
 are alike vitally connected with this movement, and no State can afford 
 to ignore it. " * # * 
 
 Guild. 
 
 The Governor of West Virginia. 
 
 ' ' The matter is of such urgent importance that it can not be further 
 delayed without great detriment to the best interest of the country. ' ' 
 
 SWANSON. 
 The Governor of Connecticut. 
 
 ''I believe that we of the present generation owe it to posterity to 
 conserve our natural resources in this direction. ' ' 
 
 Woodruff. 
 
 The Governor of Maryland. 
 
 * ' There is to my mind no waste of resources more appalling than the 
 destruction of our forest wealth — wealth that came to us by inheritance 
 with the soil." 
 
 Warfield. 
 
 The Governor of Virginia. 
 
 * ' Not only are we wasting our forests, but most of our other natural 
 resources as well. But forest preservation seems to be of first im- 
 portance — indeed, it is a subject of pressing importance." 
 
 Dawson. 
 
 2 NR 
 
— 18 — 
 
 SOME CURRENT LITERATURE. 
 
 THE following longer selections from magazines, addresses^ 
 newspaper articles, will give more complete and well 
 rounded views of the conservation idea as a whole. Why 
 would not this collection be just the thing for a reading circle 
 or an improvement club to use? It is up to date, interesting, 
 and vital to our State, to our Nation. The material has not 
 before been brought together. It has cost a good deal of labor. 
 
 Is it not strange that our schools, preparing for citizenship, 
 do not take up in some way this Conservation of Resources, so 
 vital to every one of us, so necessary to the very existence of 
 the nation? 
 
 Our boys and girls spend hours and days and weeks in study- 
 ing intently the virtues and the defects of the Articles of 
 Confederation, dead a hundred years! But they can not 
 discover in their school that men are throwing away and giving 
 away the land and the water upon which the real life of the 
 nation is builded. 
 
 They toil and moil at length over the animosities of the Civil 
 War, which were better forgotten; but they do not learn that 
 their birthrights of soil are being swept out to the sea and that 
 their birthrights in water are being seized by those who will 
 thereby become their masters and their rulers in all time to 
 come. 
 
 Is there not something here for schools to gladly learn and 
 gladly teach ? 
 
— 19 — 
 
 WE ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE. 
 
 "When expressing our indignation at the wicked waste of the people's 
 heritages it is well to remember that it is the people who are to blame 
 for it. You and I and all of us are the criminals, not merely the men 
 and the corporations who have so largely profited by the wasted 
 resources. It is easy to work up wrath and blow off steam about them ; 
 but we must remember that they have played the game according to 
 the rules, and that we, the people, make or consent to the rules of the 
 game — the laws. The big boys often try to change the rules and use 
 them unfairly doubtless, as in smaller games; but if all the other 
 children attend to it, take an interest in it, stick together, they can 
 make the rules right and keep the big fellows within bounds. 
 
 It is well to remember this : most of us, if we could, would do just 
 what the "predatory rich" have done. 
 
 One of the worst things that have been done, probably the very worst, 
 has been the taking away of the timber lands from the people. But 
 how has this been done? By buying out small owners for small prices. 
 Our careless and reckless law gives to any one 160 acres of timber land 
 if he or she will make oath that it is for his own use, not to be used for 
 the benefit of some one else. In my travels I find many people, nice 
 people, school teachers, ministers, ladies and gentlemen, locating timber 
 claims — and selling them as soon as title is complete, for a few hundred 
 dollars — three hundred, five hundred, perhaps; yet the timber itself 
 is really worth many thousands of dollars, to say nothing of the land on 
 which it stands. 
 
 Thus, for an insignificant sum for our own selfish immediate use do 
 we nice people sell the birthrights of our children's children. Thus the 
 great timber corporations acquire empires of land and princely fortunes 
 in timber. Thus does our country lose its heritage for all time. Where- 
 fore remember that we, the people, have our share of responsibility in 
 this thing. We accept these laws and help to make them. We take 
 a small share of the swag ourselves when we can get it. 
 
 The reason for the wasting and plundering and going to smash of this 
 vast and splendid estate of ours is not hard to find. It is from a simple 
 and natural cause, a universal law — hecause we, the owners, have 
 neglected it. Any property, any enterprise goes to wreck and ruin if it 
 is not attended to, guarded, watched over, by its owners. What would 
 happen to a great store or a mill or a mine if it were abandoned to whom- 
 ever happened along ? How would a farm prosper if none of its owners 
 took the trouble to look after it? Why, even a $500 house in a little 
 
— 20 ^ 
 
 village will soon be damaged beyond repair, broken, run down, carried 
 away, when it is not cared for by its owners ! And who gets the blame 
 in such case ? Not the boys who throw stones through the windows nor 
 the petty thieves who carry off the fence for kindling wood — ^but the 
 people who own it and are responsible for it. We are all responsible. 
 
 [E. H.] 
 
 TEACHING CONSERVATION. 
 
 But how can a teacher teach Conservation? By exuding it through the pores! 
 If it gets in it will come out! 
 
 A wise teacher will find a hundred ways to drop good ideas into the 
 hearts of her children. 
 
 For instance, in the careful use of the school supplies. Economy and 
 wise care are virtues greatly to be desired in all our citizenry. The 
 teacher is not working for the sake of saving a few cents for the school 
 fund ; but for the habits of the children, their way of looking at things, 
 during all their future lives. Carelessness, extravagance, recklessness, 
 are dangerous to the nation. The difference between conservation and 
 reckless waste may be taught in the use of such a common thing as 
 paper, for example. Indeed, paper is really one of our national 
 resources, as it is made of wood pulp, and wood pulp is made from trees. 
 A big edition of a Sunday newspaper requires perhaps a dozen acres 
 of woodland. Every sheet of paper, every desk, every box, every 
 splinter of wood that we see or use, represents trees, trees that were 
 chopped from our forests. Every one of our eighty million people 
 uses more than seven times as much wood per year as do the people 
 all over Europe. Every big city fire destroys a great and splendid 
 forest. Millions upon millions of acres of woodland continually go 
 into the ties along our railroad lines. Countless other forests are rotting 
 away deep under ground in the coal mines and gold mines. 
 
 The teacher who goes into the subject with interest himself will find 
 no lack of striking and interesting and valuable things to pass along 
 to his flock; things that point to civic patriotism; things more vital to 
 their fatherland than the waving of battle flags and defiance of the 
 foreign foe ! [e. h.] 
 
21 — 
 
 THE CONSERVATION OF OUR NATURAL RESOURCES. 
 
 This article will well repay thoughtful reading. It is by Gifford Pinchot, the 
 United States Forester, and was delivered as an address to the National Geo- 
 graphic Society a few months ago. Note its simplicity and its strength. 
 
 A Story With a Moral. 
 
 The conservation of our natural resources is a subject which has 
 received little attention in the past; but the facts in the case are so 
 simple, the principles so elementary, and our duty so clear, that they 
 might be fitly presented in a story like one of the old fairy tales that 
 we all loved when we were boys and girls. Such a story would run 
 like this : 
 
 Once upon a time there was a young man who had been given a great 
 pi*)&perty in a distant region, and who left home to take possession of it. 
 When he reached his property he first made himself acquainted with it. 
 As he explored it and studied its value he began to think how he would 
 make his living out of it. The problem was not a hard one. He found 
 that his property was wonderfully rich, and supplied his needs at the 
 cost of far less exertion than he would have had to make at home, for 
 it was a fair land, well watered, well timbered, abounding in game and 
 fruits, with broad meadows for cattle and horses and sheep, and with 
 no small store of rare and curious minerals and an outcrop of excellent 
 coal. Life was easy, and he lived lavishly and joyously, after the initial 
 hard work of moving in and building his house and raising his first 
 crops was over. He had far more land than he could use, far more 
 game, and what he lacked he was able to buy from home with furs, with 
 timber, with minerals, and with the surplus of his crops. 
 
 By and by he saw and liked a girl, and finally married her. Together 
 they prospered on the property, which seemed too rich to make it neces- 
 sary for them to trouble about the future. Game was still plenty, though 
 less so than at first ; the timber, though growing less, was still abundant 
 enough to last longer than they could hope to live; by breaking new 
 land they could always count on marvelous crops ; the coal was a little 
 harder to get at, but still close to the surface, and besides the man only 
 dug out the easiest to reach, and when the earth began to cave in he 
 merely started again at a new place. His stock, grazing on the meadows, 
 had trampled out some of the grass, but there was still no lack. That 
 some day strangers would possess their property when they had done 
 with it, and would find it somewhat run down, did not trouble these two 
 good people at all. 
 
 But children came to them with the years, and by and by these 
 children began to grow up. Then the point of view of the man and his 
 wife changed. They wanted to see their sons and daughters provided 
 for and settled on this property of theirs, and they began to see that 
 
— 22 — 
 
 what was enough and to spare for them would not support all their 
 children in the same comfort unless they themselves used it with better 
 foresight. Through thinking of their children they were led to live 
 more in the future. r 
 
 They looked forward and said to themselves: "Not only must we 
 meet our own needs from this property, but we must see to it that our 
 children come in for their fair share of it; so that after a while the 
 happiness we have had here may be carried on to them. ' ' So the family 
 established itself. The man became respected, and his children grew 
 up healthy and happy around him; and when in the fullness of time 
 he passed away and his children took the place in which he had stood, 
 because of his foresight and care they enjoyed the same kind of pros- 
 perity he had enjoyed. 
 
 It is a perfectly simple story; we all of us can name scores of men 
 who have done this same thing. The men and the women who do it 
 are not famous, are not regarded as remarkable in any way; they are 
 simply good, everyday, average citizens, who are carrying out the duties 
 of the average citizen. 
 
 What Have We Done With Our National Resources? 
 
 Once upon a time there was a young nation which left its home and 
 moved on to a new continent. As soon as the people who formed the 
 first settlements began to examine the value and condition of this new 
 continent, they found it marvelously rich in every possible resource. 
 The forests were so vast that, in the early days, they were not a blessing, 
 but a hindrance. The soil was so rich and there was so much of it that 
 they were able at first only to cultivate the edges of their great property. 
 It was quite plain to these people in the early times that, however much 
 land they might cover, however much they might waste, there was 
 always going to be plenty left. As time went on they discovered greater 
 and greater resources. They found wonderfully rich deposits of 
 metallic ore; great oil and gas fields, and vast stretches of the richest 
 bituminous and anthracite coal lands; noble rivers flowing through 
 broad expanses of meadow ; rich alluvial prairies ; great plains covered 
 with countless herds of buffalo and antelope; mountains filled with 
 minerals; and everywhere opportunities richer than any nation had 
 ever found elsewhere before. 
 
 They entered into this vast possession and began to use it. They 
 did not need to think much about how they used their coal, or oil, or 
 timber, or water — they would last — and they began to encroach on the 
 supply with freedom and in confidence that there would always be 
 plenty. The only word with which they described what they had, when 
 they talked about it, was the word ' ' inexhaustible. ' ' 
 
— 23 — 
 
 Let us see for a moment what the course of development of this 
 young nation was. First of all they needed men and women to settle 
 on the land and bring up children and have a stake in the country. 
 That was absolutely necessary before there could develop the great 
 nation which some of them saw ahead. As the population spread there 
 arose a need that great systems of transportation should be built to knit 
 the country together and provide for the interchange of its products. 
 These railroads called for iron, coal, and timber in great quantities. 
 Then began an unprecedented demand upon the forests. They could 
 not build those transcontinental railroad lines without millions upon 
 millions of railroad ties cut from the forests of the country ; and they 
 could not mine the iron and coal except as the forests gave them the 
 means of timbering their mines, transporting the ore, and disposing 
 of the finished product. The whole civilization which they built up 
 was conditioned on iron, coal, and timber. As they developed their 
 continent, richer than any other, from the east coast to the west, new 
 resources became revealed to them, new interests took possession of 
 them, and they used the old resources in new ways. In the East, the 
 rivers meant to them only means of transportation; in the West they 
 began to see that the rivers meant first of all crops ; that they must put 
 the rivers on the land by irrigation before they could grow wheat, 
 alfalfa, fruits, sugar beets, and other crops that make the West rich. 
 They found that to feed the vast population which had grown up in the 
 East they must have the vast ranges of the West to grow meat. They 
 found that the resources of soil and water which produced the wheat, 
 the cotton, and the meat — of iron and coal, and of timber, together 
 made up the working capital of a great nation, and that the nation 
 cdlild not grow unless it had all of these things. In taking possession 
 of them our nation used with greater effectiveness, greater energy and 
 enterprise, than any other nation had ever shown before. Nothing like 
 our growth, nothing like our wealth, nothing like the average happiness 
 of our people can be found elsewhere ; and the fundamental reason for 
 this is, on the one side, the vast natural resources which we had at 
 hand, and on the other side the character, ability, and power of our 
 people. 
 
 Now what have we done with these resources which have made us 
 great, and what is the present condition in which this marvelously 
 vigorous nation of ours finds itself? The keynote of our times is 
 "development." Every man from New York to San Francisco looks 
 to the development of the natural resources to produce the advantages 
 and the opportunities he wants for his neighbors and his friends. 
 Any one who questions the wisdom of any of the methods we are using 
 in bringing that development to pass, because he believes we are making 
 mistakes that will be expensive later on, is in danger of being considered 
 
— 24 — 
 
 an enemy to prosperity. He is in danger of having it thought of him 
 that he does not take pride in our great achievements, that he is not a 
 very good American. But in reality it is no sign that a man lacks pride 
 in the United States and the wonderful things our people have done in 
 developing this great country because he wants to see that development 
 go on indefinitely. On the contrary, real patriotism and pride in our 
 country make it the first of all duties to see that our nation shall con- 
 tinue to prosper. In sober truth, we have brought ourselves into a 
 condition in which the very serious diminution of some of our most 
 necessary resources is upon us. 
 
 What We Face. 
 
 Forest Resources. — A third of the land surface of this country was 
 originally covered with what were, all in all, the most magnificent 
 forests of the globe — a million square miles of timberland. In the 
 short time, as time counts in the life of nations, we have been here we 
 have all but reached the end of these forests. We thought it unim- 
 portant until lately that we have been destroying by fire as much timber 
 as we have used. But we have now reached the point where the growth 
 of our forests is but one third of the annual cut, while we have in store 
 timber enough for only twenty or thirty years at our present rate of 
 use. This wonderful development, which would have been impossible 
 without the cutting of the forests, has brought us where we really face 
 their exhaustion within the present generation. And we use five or six 
 times as much timber per capita as the European nations. A timber 
 famine will touch every man, woman, and child in all the land ; it will 
 affect the daily life of every one of us; and yet without consideration, 
 without forecast, and without foresight, we have placed ourselves, not 
 deliberately, but thoughtlessly, in a position where a timber famine is 
 one of the inevitable events of our near future. 
 
 Canada can not supply us, for she will need her timber herself. 
 Siberia can not supply us, for the timber is too far from water trans- 
 portation. South America can not supply us, because the timbers of 
 that vast continent are of a different character from those we use and 
 ill adapted to our need. We must suffer because we have carelessly 
 wasted the forest, this great fundamental condition of success. It is 
 impossible to repair the damage in time to escape much suffering, 
 although not too late to work hard to reduce it as much as we can. 
 
 Minerals, Oil, and Natural Gas. — But forests only begin the story of 
 our impaired capital. Our anthracite coals are said to be in danger of 
 exhaustion in fifty years, and our bituminous coals in the beginning of 
 the next century; some of our older oil fields are already exhausted; 
 the natural gas has been wasted, burning night and day in many towns 
 until the supply has failed. Our iron deposits grow less each year. 
 
— 25 — 
 
 Our ranges in the West, from which we first drove the buffalo to cover 
 them again with cattle and sheep, are capable of supporting but about 
 one half what they could under intelligent management, and the price 
 of beef is raised accordingly. Nearly every one of our wonderful 
 resources we have used without reasonable foresight or reasonable care, 
 and as each becomes exhausted a heavier burden of hardship will be 
 laid upon us as a people. 
 
 Now what is our remedy? The remedy is the perfectly simple one 
 of common sense applied to national affairs as common sense is applied 
 to personal affairs. This is no abstruse or difficult question. We have 
 hitherto as a nation taken the same course as did at first the young man 
 who came into possession of his new property. It is time for a change. 
 
 It is true that some natural resources renew themselves while others 
 do not. Our mineral resources once gone are gone forever. It may 
 appear, therefore, at first thought that conservation does not apply to 
 them since they can be used only once. But this is far from being the 
 fact. Methods of coal mining, for instance, have been permitted in 
 this country which take out on the average but half of the coal. Then 
 in a short time the roof sinks in on the other half, which thereafter can 
 never be mined. Oil and natural gas also have been and are being 
 exploited with great waste and as though there never could be an end 
 to them. The forests we can replace at great cost and with an interval 
 of suffering. 
 
 Soil Waste. — The soil which is washed from the surface of our farms 
 every year to the amount of a billion tons, making, with the further loss 
 of fertilizing elements carried away in solution, the heaviest tax the 
 farmer has to pay, may in the course of centuries be replaced by the 
 chemical disintegration of the rock; but it is decidedly wiser to keep 
 what we have by careful methods of cultivation. We may very profit- 
 ably stop putting our farms into our streams, to be dug out at great 
 expense through river and harbor appropriations. Fertile soil is not 
 wanted in the bed of a stream, and it is wanted on the surface of the 
 farms and the forest-covered slopes of the mountains. Yet we spend 
 millions upon millions of dollars every year removing from our rivers 
 what ought never to have got into them. 
 
 Waste Through Piecemeal Planning. 
 
 Besides exhausting the unrenewable and impairing the renewable 
 resources, we have left unused vast resources which are capable of 
 adding enormously to the wealth of the country. Our streams have 
 been used in the West mainlj^ for irrigation and in the East mainly for 
 navigation. It has not occurred to us that a stream is valuable, not 
 merely for one, but for a considerable number of uses ; that these uses 
 are not mutually exclusive, and that to obtain the full benefit of Avhat 
 
— 26 — 
 
 the stream can do for us we should plan to develop all its uses together. 
 For example, when the National Government builds dams for naviga- 
 tion on streams, it has often disregarded the possible use, for power, 
 of the water that flows over those dams. Engineers say that many 
 hundred thousand horsepower are going to waste over Government dams 
 in this way. Since a fair price for power, where it is in demand, is 
 from $20 to $80 per horsepower annually, it will be seen that the 
 Government has here, developed, yet lying idle, a resource capable, 
 under the right conditions, of adding enormously to the national wealth. 
 So also in developing the western streams for irrigation, in many places 
 irrigation and power might be made to go hand in hand. 
 
 Danger of Monopoly. 
 
 If the public does not see to it that the control of water power is 
 kept in the hands of the public, we are certain in the near future to 
 find ourselves in the grip of those who will be able to control, with a 
 monopoly absolutely without parallel in the past, the daily life of our 
 people. Let us suppose a man in a western town, in a region without 
 coal, rising on a cold morning, a few years hence, when invention and 
 enterprise have brought to pass the things which we can already foresee 
 as coming in the application of electricity. He turns on the electric 
 light made from water power; his breakfast is cooked on an electric 
 stove heated by the power of the streams; his morning newspaper is 
 printed on a press moved by electricity from the streams; he goes to 
 his office in a trolley car moved by electricity from the same source. 
 The desk upon which he writes his letters, the merchandise which he 
 sells, the crops which he raises, will have been brought to him or will 
 be taken to market from him in a freight car moved by electricity. His 
 wife will run her sewing machine or her churn, and factories will turn 
 their shafts and wheels, by the same power. In every activity of his 
 life that man and his family and his neighbors will have to pay toll to 
 those who have been able to monopolize the great motive power of 
 electricity made from water power, if that monopoly is allowed to 
 become established. Never before in the history of this or any other 
 free country has there existed the possibility of such intimate daily 
 friction between a monopoly and the life of the average citizen. 
 
 It has not yet occurred to many of our people that this great power 
 should be conserved for the use of the public. "We have regarded it as 
 a thing to be given away to any man who would take it. We have 
 carried over our point of view derived from the early conditions when 
 it was a God-send to have a man come into the country to develop 
 power and we were willing to give him anything to induce him to come. 
 We have carried over that point of view into a time when the dread of 
 
— 27 — 
 
 monopoly of this kind ought to be in the mind of the average man 
 everywhere. That is an instance of a resource neglected from the point 
 of view of the public. 
 
 A New Point of View. 
 
 But this is a time to consider not one resource, but all resources 
 together. Alreadj^ here and there small associations of citizens have 
 become possessed of certain facts, and have begun to work at certain 
 sides of what is fundamentally one great problem. We have a drainage 
 association, whose object is to make habitable millions upon millions of 
 acres now lying waste in swamps all over the country, but capable of 
 supporting in comfort millions of people. We have forestry associa- 
 tions, waterway' associations, irrigation associations, associations of 
 many kinds touching this problem of conservation at different points, 
 each endeavoring to benefit the common weal along its own line, but 
 each interested only in its own particular piece of the work and 
 unaware that it is attacking the outside, not the heart of the problem, 
 Now a greater thing is opening out in the sight of the people. This 
 problem of the conservation of natural resources is a single question. 
 Each of these various bodies that have been working at different phases 
 of it must come together on conservation as a common platform. By 
 the joining of these units we shall have a mass of intelligent, interested, 
 public-spirited citizens anxiaus to adopt a new point of view about this 
 country of ours. 
 
 That is the crux of the whole matter — a new point of view about our 
 country. We have been so busy getting rich, developing and growing, 
 so proud of our growth, that we have let things go on until some 
 intolerable abuse has driven us to immediate action. It is time that we 
 put an end to this kind of opportunism, of mere drifting. We must 
 take the point of view taken by the average prudent business man, or 
 man in any walk of life who has property and is interested in it. What 
 the average man does in his own affairs is to foresee trouble and avoid it 
 if he can. What this nation of ours is doing in this fundamental 
 matter of natural resources is to run right into trouble head down and 
 eyes shut, and so make that trouble inevitable before taking any step 
 to prevent it. But it should not take long to reach the stage of national 
 thought where we shall deliberately plan to avoid the difficulties which 
 can be foreseen, if only we can bring together all who have already 
 begun to concern themselves with one or another aspect of the conserva- 
 tion problem. 
 
 The Problem Before Us. 
 
 This nation has, on the continent of North America, three and a half 
 million square miles. What shall we do with it? How can we make 
 ourselves and our children happiest, most vigorous and efficient, and our 
 
— 28 — 
 
 civilization the highest and most influential, as we use that splendid 
 heritage? Ought not the nation to undertake to answer that question 
 in the spirit of wisdom, prudence, and foresight? There is reason to 
 think we are on the verge of doing this very thing. We are on the 
 verge of saying to ourselves: ''Let us do the best we can with our 
 natural resources; let us find out what we have, how they can best be 
 used, how they can best be conserved. Above all, let us have clearly in 
 mind the great and fundamental fact that this nation will not end in 
 the year 1950, or a hundred years after that, or five hundred years 
 after that; that we are just beginning a national history the end of 
 which we can not see, since we are still young." In truth we are at a 
 critical point in that history. We may pass on along the line we have 
 been following, exhaust our natural resources, continue to let the future 
 take care of itself; or we may do the simple, obvious, common-sense 
 thing in the interest of the nation, just as each of us does in his own 
 personal affairs. 
 
 On the way in which we decide to handle this great possession which 
 has been given us, on the turning which we take now, hangs the welfare 
 of those who are to come after us. Whatever success we may have in 
 any other line of national endeavor, whether we regulate trusts prop- 
 erly, whether we control our great public service corporations as we 
 should, whether capital and labor adjust their relations in the best 
 manner or not — whatever we may do with all these and other such 
 questions, behind and below them all is this fundamental problem. Are 
 we going to protect our springs of prosperity, our sources of well-being, 
 our raw material of industry and commerce, and employer of capital 
 and labor combined; or are we going to dissipate them? According as 
 we accept or ignore our responsibility as trustees of the nation's welfare, 
 our children and our children 's children for uncounted generations will 
 call us blessed, or will lay their suffering at our doors. We shall decide 
 whether their lives, on the average, are to be lived in a flourishing 
 country, full of all that helps to make men comfortable, happy, strong, 
 and effective, or whether their lives are to be lived in a country like the 
 miserable outworn regions of the earth which other nations before us 
 have possessed without foresight and turned into hopeless deserts. We 
 are no more exempt from the operation of natural laws than are the 
 people of any other part- of the world. When the facts are squarely 
 before us, when the magnitude of the interests at stake is clearly before 
 our people it will surely be decided aright. 
 
29 
 
 CULTIVATE THE FORESTS. 
 
 This is a clipping from a fine article upon the STATESMANSHIP OF 
 FORESTRY by Author W. Page in the World's Work Magazine for January, 
 1908. A number of the pictures in this volume are from the same source. 
 
 Many people consider the approaching timber famine with the same 
 feeling of regret and helplessness with which they listen to the story of 
 the extinction of the buffalo. They feel that both are wild things which 
 must inevitably perish before the advance of civilization. But the 
 forests, unlike the buffalo, thrive in captivity. A large proportion of 
 the trees in a wild forest are not best suited to our use. They are of 
 the wrong species — like weeds in a garden — are too old or crooked and 
 have a variety of other blemishes ; and, while doing us little good them- 
 selves, they prevent the growth of better timber. To destroy all the 
 original growth and then plant a new forest on the devastated area 
 seems illogical, but it is neither impractical nor unprofitable, as the 
 experience of Germany and experiments in this country show. It is 
 much easier, however, and more profitable, gradually to turn the wild 
 forests into cultivated ones. 
 
 The French began to do this in the fourteenth century. * * * 
 France, as thickly settled as it is, has maintained its cultivated timber 
 for five hundred years, while the West with its scattered population is 
 about to make an end of its wild forests in seventy-five years. In con- 
 trast to the forestry conditions of France are those of southern Tunis. 
 It was once a very fertile country, but the Arab conquest destroyed 
 all the trees and now the ruins of its old capital, Suffetula, stand in an 
 uninhabitable desert. "Not long after the conquest," says M. Jusse- 
 raud, "an Arab chronicler recalled in his book the former times of 
 prosperity and added : ' But in those days, one could walk from Tripoli 
 to Tunis in the shade.' " 
 
 CONFESSION TO NEXT GENERATION. 
 
 Clipping from a graduating address to the Fresno High School by Dr. 
 Frederic Burk. 
 
 "We dislike to go on with these embarrassmg confessions, but you 
 will learn the whole wretched story yourselves sometime, and we may 
 as well tell you. As for the coal and iron, our fathers left us enough 
 to last for two or three thousand years if it had been economically 
 mined according to some system established by law. We regret to tell 
 you, upon the authority of Andrew Carnegie and John Mitchell, that 
 we Ve wasted in getting out what we could use what should have lasted 
 eighteen hundred or two thousand years. The coal may hold out 
 
— 30 — 
 
 another two hundred years and the iron one hundred years, but both 
 will come high in your time. We wish we did not have to mention the 
 oil and the natural gas, but w^e may as well tell you that we've sucked 
 them out of the earth almost completely and wasted them. 
 
 Dear next generation, such is part of the shameful explanation truth 
 compels us to make to you concerning the waste and loss of your patri- 
 mony. We've skimmed the cream and have led jolly lives — we do 
 sincerely hope you like skimmed milk, and little of it. When you are 
 shivering with the cold in a coalless country, when you are nursing one 
 blade of grass to grow for you w^here two grew for us, when you have 
 ceased automobiling on account of the high price of oil, then you'll, 
 remember us in our riotous plenty. Don't be too angry with us. We 
 robbed you. We took the bread out of your mouths, you our babes, and 
 fed it to the vultures w^ho were fattening upon our national dishonor. 
 But our sins have been the sins of ignorance rather than of willfulness. 
 Your fathers were happy, devil-may-care fellows, whose courage, as 
 war patriots, you must in justice honor, but who never had any com- 
 prehension of the meaning of a civil patriot nor the slightest realization 
 that it required any of the qualities of courage, self-sacrifice for the 
 common good, and intelligence which in war patriotism we have exem- 
 plified." 
 
 OUR WATER LAWS. 
 
 Pointed Statement from a letter by Allison Ware, of the San Francisco State 
 Normal School. 
 
 • "Worst of all, the water running in our streams has been so care- 
 lessly handled b}^ our laws, (patterned as they are after the laws of 
 England, where water is a pest and the only thought is to get it oif the 
 place as quickly as possible,) that most of it is now in private owner- 
 ship, much of it many times over, with results that have produced wide- 
 spread discomfort and that clearly throttle the growth of the State as 
 a land of farming. 
 
 A few things, it seems to me, the people of California must speedily 
 come to understand. First, the wonderful value of water; what it 
 means to the farmer, to the manufacturer, to the main sources of wealth 
 of all sorts. Second, the endless litigation, fearful waste of water wealth, 
 harsh water-lordism, an uneconomic application of streams to produc- 
 tion ; all the results of our foolish laws. Third, that there is a remedy, 
 partial because we have been slow to seek it, but still a remedy that 
 will save to the future the possibility of sustaining an agricultural 
 community of two million prosperous homes in California. 
 
 As to this great subject of water in relation to agriculture in Cali- 
 fornia, Bulletin 100, Department of Agriculture, contains the whole 
 story and shows us our tardy remedy." 
 
31 — 
 
 LAST OF THE BIG TREES. 
 
 Extracts from a notable article in Collier's Weekly under the above title by 
 Arthur Ruhl. Doubtless a good deal of this will seem merely sentimental to a 
 hard-headed business man who deals in trees and lumber. Nevertheless, it is 
 well to remember that the mightiest things are started by sentiments. Every 
 great movement that has affected the destinies of mankind had its beginning in 
 a mere sentiment that somehow found lodgment in some one's heart. The 
 wise man barkens carefully to the drift of sentiment. 
 
 They rise up two hundred, two hundred and fifty, three hundred feet 
 sometimes, the trunks bare of branches for seventy-five or a hundred 
 feet, fluted, gray-brown columns like pillars of stone. Far overhead, 
 the delicate tracery of their foliage weaves a roof which shuts out the 
 direct sunlight and gives to everything below the soft twilight radiance 
 of a cathedral. Like a Gothic cathedral, indeed, is the natural aisle 
 
 "" '* >*\ifc s» 'm 
 
 
 , m 
 
 
 Kedwutnl monarch on the way to the mill. 
 
 with the fluted, columnar trunks rising side by side toward the moun- 
 tain background, the mellowed light filtering through the arching roof 
 far above. 
 
 Even the curious fluted trunks and the color — a cinnamon turned 
 stone-gray by age and weather— seems exotic and to belong to an older 
 age, when strange and monstrous animals roamed the forests. And 
 well they may look so, for they — and more especially their near rela- 
 tives, the giant Sequoias of the Sierras — are the oldest living things in 
 our world. The latter have conquered fire and snow and the other* 
 enemies that have attacked them through the centuries, and stood there, 
 lofty and silent and serene, while wars have raged and been forgotten 
 and religions grown up and fallen to decay. The redwoods proper, as 
 these trees in the Bohemian grove are called, are not quite so ancient, 
 but they were mighty trees, at any rate, before the Roman Empire fell, 
 and they and their brothers may still be standing when the solitary 
 New Zealander looks upon the ruins of St. Paul's — those at least which 
 haven't been cut up into fenceposts and shingles. 
 
— 32 — 
 
 To an outsider, the spell they cast necessarily overshadows the doings 
 of the little humans playing at their feet. In the cool, fragrant interior 
 of the grove, the heatic bustle of the ordinary world seems trifling and 
 unimportant. Voices come pleasantly across the great spaces ; even the 
 humor of the street, provided it has a basis in reality, is mellowed and 
 enriched and merged into the region of art. The grove becomes a world 
 in itself — a more radiant world; you walk out into the open and are 
 conscious of leaving some enchantment behind, of entering a more 
 difficult, harsher, more material universe. Voices sound as from very 
 far away through the trees, men lounging in groups here and there 
 are listening and laughing carelessly — it is as though the blessings of 
 
 
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 A redwood forest in California in its natural state. Observe the shrubs 
 and ferns that flourish in the cool aisles of the woodland. 
 
 humor and grace and happy insight belonged to all who breathed 
 that air. 
 
 An Easterner, a young poet and playwright, was a guest at the camp. 
 He had never been West before, never seen the big trees. And it was 
 into this pagan temple that he was led. The day before, he and some 
 of his friends went to another forest nearby, the Armstrong grove. 
 Here were the same trees, only a little wilder, with more of the natural 
 undergrowth between. And that same day, in a newspaper, he read 
 that the Armstrong grove had been sold to a lumber company. It was 
 about midnight that night when I first caught sight of him on the 
 opposite side of the circle that surrounded the huge club campfire. He 
 came over to our side. He was like some one who had just seen innocent 
 men condemned to death and knew that if he could not get help they 
 would be executed the next morning. His voice shook as he spoke. 
 
 ""Why, I've seen them," he said. ''They are all numbered— 61-73-87 
 
— 33 — 
 
 — ready to cut. They are just like these" — he motioned upward where 
 the dark roof of the forest closed in far above the light of the fire. 
 "And they're going to cut them down. Why, it seemed to me when 
 I saw those numbers — you go over to-morrow morning and you'll 
 understand — if a man could only prevent that destruction, could only 
 save those trees i * =* * " 
 
 The Giant Tree proper lives only in the thin, dry air of the Sierras, 
 rarely below 5,000 feet altitude, climbing thence up to the 8,000-foot 
 level and even higher, so that it may look, with little hindrance, to the 
 bare peaks and the glaciers above. It is found in much less homo- 
 geneous forests than the redwood, sharing the dominion of these sunny 
 plateaus with mighty sugar and yellow pines and spruces and firs. 
 
 Here is the redwood forest after it has been "developed" by our 
 wasteful methods. 
 
 In the southern portions of the belt, along the Kaweah and Tule rivers, 
 there are Giant-Tree groves that deserve to be called forests — vigorous 
 young trees and saplings, growing beside their ancient, storm-stricken 
 sires, but more often the Giant Trees bear much the same relation to 
 the forest as a whole as is borne by the occasional primeval oaks found 
 among the common second-growth timber in the "woods" of the East 
 and Middle West. 
 
 The largest tree known is probably the "General Sherman," in the 
 Giant Forest Grove in the Sequoia National Park, about forty miles 
 east of the town of Visalia, in the central southern part of the State. 
 It has a circumference of lOS feet; 200 feet from the ground it is not 
 less than 70 feet around, and even with its crown broken off it is 280 
 feet high. 
 
 It was of such trees as this, which, scarred by fire, broken off by 
 
 3 — NR 
 
— 34 — 
 
 storms or lightning, yet tower aloft in a majesty and beauty almost 
 undimmed, as if gifted with eternal life, that John Muir wrote : 
 
 ''So exquisitely harmonious and finely balanced are even 
 the very mightiest of these monarchs of the woods, in all their 
 proportions and circumstances, that never is anything over- 
 grown or monstrous looking about them. * * * No other 
 tree in the Sierra forest has foliage so densely massed, nor 
 presents outlines so firmly drawn and so steadily subordinate 
 to a special type. A knotty, ungovernable-looking branch, five 
 to eight feet thick, may be seen pushing out abruptly from the 
 smooth trunk, as if sure to throw the regular curve into con- 
 fusion, but as soon as the general outline is reached, it stops 
 short and dissolves in spreading bosses of law-abiding sprays, 
 just as if every tree were growing beneath some huge, invisible 
 bell glass, against whose sides every branch was being pressed 
 and molded, yet somehow indulging in so many small depar- 
 tures from the regular form that there is still an appearance 
 of freedom. * * * 
 
 ''As soon as any accident happens to the crown of these 
 Sequoias, such as being stricken off by lightning or broken by 
 storms, then the branches beneath the wound, no matter how 
 situated, seem to be excited, like a colony of bees that have lost 
 their queen, and become anxious to repair the damage. Limbs 
 that have grown outward for centuries at right angles to the 
 trunk begin to turn upward to assist in making a new crown, 
 each speedily assuming the special form of true summits. 
 Even in the case of mere stumps, burned half through, some 
 mere ornamental tuft will try to go aloft and do its best as a 
 leader in forming a new head. * * * 
 
 "I never saw a big tree that had died a natural death; 
 barring accidents, they seem to be immortal, being exempt 
 from all the diseases that afflict and kill other trees. Unless 
 destroyed by man, they live on indefinitely, until burned, 
 smashed by lightning, or cast down by storms or by the giving 
 way of the ground on which they stand. * * * The colossal 
 •scarred monument in the Kings River forest is burned half 
 way through, and I spent a day in making an estimate of its 
 age, clearing away the charred surface with an axe, and care- 
 fully counting the annual rings by the aid of a pocket lens. 
 The wood rings in the section I laid bare were so involved and 
 contorted in some places that I was not able to determine its 
 age exactly, but I counted over four thousand rings, which 
 showed that this tree was in its prime, swaying in the Sierra 
 winds when Christ walked the earth. No other tree in the 
 world, as far as I know, has looked down on so many centuries 
 as the Sequoia, or open such impressive and suggestive views 
 into history. ' ' 
 
 And it is monarchs like these, who have seen the sun rise on a million 
 crystalline Sierra mornings, who have fought their centuries of battle 
 against fire and winter snows and thunderbolts and winds, who must 
 now fall before tiny scrambling humans with ravenous axes and be 
 
— 35 — 
 
 turned into posts and grapevine stakes. At the close of the same 
 chapter quoted above is Muir's prophecy that ''unless protective meas- 
 ures he speedily invented and applied, in a few decades, at the farthest, 
 all that will he left of the Sequoia gigantea will he a few hacked and 
 scarred monuments. ' ' 
 
 Yet all through the belt these wonderful monuments are being 
 destroyed. They are not felled to make pillars for temples. No unusual 
 or beautiful service is performed through their destruction. They are 
 first chopped down, then, with enormous waste, blown to pieces with 
 gunpowder, and then ironically split up into fence posts and grapevine 
 stakes. That is about as low a task a good wood could be put to — only 
 a step higher than the splinters from old boxes which elderly ladies 
 stick into flowerpots to hold up geraniums. 
 
 The only grove thoroughly safe from destruction is the Mariposa, 
 which is owned by the State of California. In the Sequoia and General 
 Grant National Parks, which, theoretically, are owned by the nation, 
 there are about 1,200 acres in private ownership. Captain Young 
 secured options on the Sequoia National Park holdings a few years ago, 
 and the Government could have bought them then, it is said, for the 
 very reasonable sum of $86,000. However the owners may have 
 acquired title, it is only fair to say that they have made no attempt to 
 hold up the Government for an unreasonable price. As usual, however, 
 Congress did not see fit to act. There is nothing to prevent the destruc- 
 tion of these trees, should the owners choose to cut them down, except 
 the fact that there is no lumber road out of the park, and the Govern- 
 ment has thus far declined to grant a right of way. If the owners 
 chose to force their claim, however, it is extremely doubtful if the 
 Government's position could be legally upheld. 
 
 The preservation of giant trees is a question for the people them- 
 selves. How much are these trees worth to them, not as lumber, but 
 as monuments, as wonderful and beautiful relics of a vanished age? 
 For they are relics and monuments — the world has no other Sequoias. 
 They are either to be preserved or destroyed forever — like the Pyramids 
 or the Parthenon. And although there are several groves, the number 
 of trees which, in comparison with the majestic pines and firs and 
 spruces round them, can properly be called "giant" trees is probably 
 not more than five hundred. 
 
 Just what methods Government, State, and individuals should adopt 
 is rather beyond the purpose of this article, which merely undertakes 
 to explain what, and where the giant trees are. To be sure, one can't 
 help thinking of California millionaires. Some of them have public 
 spirit and wish to do something for their country. Any man who saves 
 one of these groves, or even one giant tree for the people bestows a gift 
 which not only will do him honor during his lifetime, but will still be 
 
— 36 — 
 
 standing, as it is to-day, hundreds, possibly thousands, of years after 
 all the vain little human structures of our day have crumbled to pieces 
 or been pounded up into macadam streets. 
 
 DREDGER MINING. 
 
 Our laws are stupid, too, in regard to the dredger industry. They 
 allow capitalists to come into our fertile valleys, pay big prices for 
 fields, orchards, vineyards, and convert them into barren piles of rocks. 
 This makes a temporary prosperity. The owners of the soil get a lot of 
 money, work is plentiful, prices are good — and the capitalist carries 
 away large profits, perhaps. But the brief prosperity passes away in 
 four or five years — and what of the land ? It is no more ! It would have 
 otherwise been producing food, supporting people and paying taxes for 
 four or five hundred years or four or five thousand — but now it is gone. 
 It is a hideous desolation for all time to come. 
 
 There is something wrong in this. It is legal at present, but it is not 
 moral. No one should have a right to destroy the Homes of the future. 
 It is against the general good. We have a right to use the land — but not 
 to destroy it. [E- h.] 
 
 THE LOSS OF OUR SOIL. 
 
 This striking statement is from that splendid journal The Outlook, edited by 
 Lyman Abbott. 
 
 We are in the habit of speaking of the solid earth and the eternal 
 hills as though they, at least, were free from the vicissitudes of time, 
 and certain to furnish perpetual support for prosperous human life. 
 This conclusion is as false as the term "inexhaustible" applied to other 
 natural resources. The waste of soil is among the most dangerous of 
 all wastes now in progress in the United States. In 1896 Professor 
 Shaler, than whom no one has spoken with greater authority on this 
 subject, estimated that in the upland regions of the states south of 
 Pennsylvania three thousand square miles of soil had been destroyed 
 as the result of forest denudation, and that the destruction was then 
 proceeding at the rate of one hundred square miles of fertile soil per 
 year. No seeing man can travel through the United States without 
 being struck with the enormous and unnecessary loss of fertility by 
 easily preventable soil wash. The soil so lost, as in the case of many 
 other wastes, becomes itself a source of damage and expense, and must 
 be removed from the channels of our navigable streams at an enormous 
 annual cost. The Mississippi River alone is estimated to transport 
 yearly four hundred million tons of sediment, or about twice the amount 
 of material to be excavated from the Panama Canal. This material is 
 the most fertile portion of our richest fields, transformed from a 
 blessing to a curse by unrestricted erosion. 
 
— 37 
 
 THE LARGEST NATIONAL TASK. 
 
 From the address of President Roosevelt at the meeting of the Conservation 
 Conference held in Washington, D. C, December 8, 1908. 
 
 I welcome you to Washington and to the work you have gathered to 
 do. No service to the nation in time of peace could be of greater worth 
 than the work which has brought you together. In its essence your task 
 is to make the nation's future as great as its present. That is what 
 the conservation of our resources means. This movement means that 
 we shall not become great in the present at the expense of the future, 
 but that we shall show ourselves truly great in the present by providing 
 for the greatness of our children's children who are to inherit the land 
 after us. It is the largest national task of to-day, and I thank you for 
 making ready to undertake it. 
 
 I am especially glad to welcome the cooperation of the States, 
 through their Conservation Commissions and otherwise. Such coopera- 
 tion gives earnest of mutual assistance between states and nation, and 
 mutual benefits to follow. "Without it the great task of perpetuating 
 the national welfare would succeed, if at all, with difficulty. If states 
 and nation work for it together, all in their several fields, and all 
 joining heartily where the field is common, we are certain of success 
 in advance. We are concerned with the people's rights; if this means 
 national rights, well and good ; if it means states ' rights, well and good ; 
 we are for whatever serves the cause of the people's rights. 
 
 The results of the inventory of resources will be laid before the 
 present conference by the National Conservation Commission. I shall 
 not attempt to review these results further than to say that the more 
 striking facts brought out at the conference last May are amply con- 
 firmed. These facts are sobering. No right-minded citizen would stop 
 the proper use of our resources, but every good American must realize 
 that national improvidence follows the same course and leads to the 
 same end as personal improvidence — and no man is a good American 
 if he does not think of future Americans, any more than a man is a 
 good citizen if he does not think of his children's welfare; for there 
 isn 't any man whom we despise more than the man who has a good time 
 himself and whose children pay for it. So with the nation ; that nation 
 is contemptible that riots in abundance by wasting the heritage it should 
 leave to the citizens that are to come afterwards. Needless waste must 
 stop. The time to deride or neglect the statements of experts and the 
 teaching of the facts has gone by. The time to act on what we already 
 know has arrived. Common prudence, common sense, and common 
 business principles are applicable to national affairs just as they are to 
 private affairs, and the time has come to apply them in dealing with 
 the foundations of our prosperity. 
 
38 
 
 THE WASTE IN MUD. 
 
 This article is from The Saturday Evening Post of March 27th. It is a fine 
 example of modern American newspaper English. It tells the story in a 
 deliciously whimsical, humorous way. Yet the grim facts stick out boldly all 
 through it, in spite of its quips and jests. It is by Emerson Hough. 
 
 With the exception of that certain wicked uncle, of whom nothing 
 ever was expected and of whom no good could be predicted, all your 
 family, like the average American family, no doubt regularly went to 
 church. Probably the majority stayed over for Sabbath-school in the 
 little church with white walls and black walnut pews. You could not 
 have been in a better place. At church or Sabbath-school you all stood 
 in a row and sang that easy, lilting old hymn which says : 
 
 Little drops of water, little grains of sand, 
 Make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land. 
 
 You could not have sung a better song. We all used to sing that song 
 with cheerfulness, indeed with enthusiasm — Lit-tle drops of wa-a-a-ter, 
 lit-tle gra-ay-ins of sand, make the mighty o-o-shun, an' the pleh-heh-sent 
 la-a-a-nd ! That was the way it ran. After we had sung it we all went 
 home and forgot all about it. The next Monday morning Dad went back 
 to farming, just the way his Dad had, and the Dad who antedated that 
 one, world without end ; and not one of those Dads was ever wise enough 
 to know the hymn was right, or to figure out what the hymn meant or 
 ought to mean. It is a splendid hymn, full of vast elemental truth, and 
 it has a lot to do with farming. 
 
 Heretofore, your folks and mine hadn't thought that geology had 
 much to do with farming, any more than religion had. As a matter of 
 fact, they both do. The only trouble is, the average American, like you 
 and me, does very little thinking in religion, politics or business. The 
 farmer knows the country immediately around him. The city man does 
 not even know all of the city where he lives, only a little corner of it. It 
 is this carelessness in religion, politics, business and geology which gives 
 the sad-eyed Mr. James J. Hill still further opportunity to grieve over 
 the future of this country. 
 
 What Mr. Hill sees is the time when five hundred millions of Japanese 
 and Chinamen will be making all our manufactured goods under a scale 
 of living so much cheaper than the American standard as to crush out 
 all American competition. This means not only the fiercest struggle 
 ever known for trade, but the fiercest struggle ever known for a mere 
 living. It is the war between the Oriental standard of living and the 
 American standard as we now know it. The decisive battle of that war 
 must be fought on the American farm, not in the California legislature. 
 The American standard of living is based on the theory of an exhaustless 
 
— 39 — 
 
 bank account. Our account has never been overdrawn, and we have 
 never had our bankbook balanced. It is only now that a few of our 
 wiser men begin to see that it is time for us to get a balance from the 
 clerk at the desk. We have been checking out, like inebriated mariners, 
 what we had or thought we had in this rich bank of America, land of the 
 free, country of endless opportunity. Now we have used up our forests, 
 are exhausting our mines at fearsome speed, have exterminated most of 
 our wild game, endangered the food supply which comes from the 
 waters, and, in general, done all w^e could to put an end to our great 
 resources, recklessly spending not only our interest but also our princi- 
 
 A hundred acres of good land made worthless by flood, 
 fence posts covered by sand. 
 
 Orchards smothered and 
 
 pal. We have not even left unscathed the pleasant land. Not only are 
 we using up at mad speed the natural products of the soil, but also are 
 using up the soil itself. 
 
 If you think that the soil is exhaustless, or that it can be replaced, it 
 might behoove you to take a homoeopathic dose of geology and also take 
 another guess. Mr. Roosevelt and most of the Congress of the United 
 States would like to have us all take the trouble of studying the ground 
 we stand on. Mr. Roosevelt's recent message asked us to pass our bank- 
 books in at the window for a balance. It is an unpleasant thing to do. 
 There are always so many more vouchers out than we thought. The 
 balance is always so much smaller than we thought, and the bank has 
 
40 — 
 
 such an unpleasant way of being right in its figures. Yet the time has 
 come for a show-down between the American people and America itself. 
 Out on the Blackfoot Reservation there stands a tall, lone mountain, 
 rising like a monument above the surrounding plain, and nearly detached 
 from the Rockies, which lie behind it. This peak the Indians call Chief 
 Mountain. Here the Blackfoot sometimes comes to pray. In his mysti- 
 cism his prayer runs: 
 ' ' Thou, at whose feet 
 the buried years lie 
 fallen!" That is to 
 say, there is in his 
 mind the thought of 
 the slow forces of 
 Nature. He reverences 
 the idea of erosion. He 
 would understand and 
 not forget that hymn 
 if he sung it, which in 
 effect tells us that all 
 we have in this world 
 comes of the relations 
 of soil and water. 
 There will be a few 
 million American farm- 
 ers who will learn that 
 same truth some time. 
 The somewhat mad and 
 drunken American peo- 
 ple have ignored and 
 inverted that truth 
 heretofore. They have 
 done all they could to 
 go bankrupt, to ruin 
 one of the richest por- 
 tions of the earth 's sur- 
 face, one of the pleas- 
 antest lands ever taken over for human habitation, one obviously 
 intended by the Great Forces as the place for the development of the 
 highest form of civilization and the most splendid flowering of human 
 endeavor. 
 
 What is the pleasant land, and where does it come from ? Of course, 
 the average man supposes that the soil was always there, like Uncle Joe 
 Cannon, Niagara Falls and the tax deficit; but, as a matter of fact, the 
 soil grew. In that vast story the action was rather more deliberate than 
 
 Wasted country, caused by removal of forest cover. 
 Heav5' rains wash the soil away, down to naked 
 rock. The river channels are clogged and this 
 region is useless, lost to the world. 
 
41 — 
 
 As a result of deforestation of the hills above a little stream 
 swells to a torrent like this. The rich bottom land is 
 carried away, leaving only rocks and gravel behind. 
 
 that of a vaudeville sketch. Geology is not dramatic in that neurotic 
 sense of the word which customarily we employ to-day. Yet you and I, 
 
 and this country 
 and other coun- 
 tries, are figures 
 in the great 
 drama. It might 
 not harm us to 
 note what a lead- 
 ing scientist says 
 as to the time of 
 the action of the 
 play: 
 
 "For average 
 rock, under ordi- 
 narily favorable 
 conditions in our 
 range of climate, 
 the usual esti- 
 mate has been a 
 foot of waste in 
 four thousand to 
 six thousand years, which includes the channel cutting and bank under- 
 mining. These are too rapid for ordinary soil-waste under our normal 
 natural conditions. Without any pretensions to a close estimate, I 
 should be un- 
 willing to name 
 a mean rate of 
 soil formation 
 greater than one 
 foot in ten thou- 
 sand years on 
 the basis of ob- 
 servation since 
 the glacial 
 period. I sus- 
 pect that, if we 
 could positively 
 determine the 
 time taken in the 
 , formation of the 
 four feet of soil 
 
 , 1 Fai-m land destroyed by gullies and sandbars from freshet. 
 
 next to ttie rOCK rpj-^^ farm was abandoned in consequence. 
 
— 42 — 
 
 over the average domain where such depth obtains, it would be found 
 above rather than below forty thousand years. Under such an estimate, 
 to preserve good working depth, surface wastage should not exceed some 
 such rate as one inch in one thousand years. When ovir soils are gone 
 we too must go, unless we shall find some way to feed on raw rock or 
 its equivalent. ' ' 
 
 So there is something in the story of the pleasant land. Search all the 
 dictionaries through, comb out all the rhetoric books, and you couldn't 
 get a happier phrase than that : ' ' The pleasant land. " It is excellent. 
 It is perfect. Like any other savage, you feel a deep thrill of delight 
 when you see the vast pictures of the unhurt out-of-doors. You have 
 delight in the sight of green trees, of growing grasses and nodding 
 flowers. This panorama of hill and dale, of rolling lands and forest- 
 covered valleys and lofty mountains pleases you. Why? It is because 
 all this was laid out in the intent of Nature to produce you and me and 
 support us. It is beautiful in the beauty of utility. It is laid out on 
 precisely the right lines to keep up the balance of the aforesaid little 
 drops of water and little grains of sand, of which the one supports the 
 other in the making of this pleasant land. It got its contours out of 
 that balance. We grew out of the contours. This vast and splendid 
 landscape is the portrait of our mother. We forget the hymn about it. 
 Like a weak, irritable, nasty-tempered child, Ave strike the great ]\Iother 
 in the face, presuming on her vast indifference or her vast pity. And 
 all the while Man is only the last animal that has been invented, and 
 some time there will be a successor for him. If we destroy the soil we 
 hasten that day when the successor shall come. Now the undeniable 
 truth is that we are spending more than our inch of soil per thousand 
 years. 
 
 Civilized man. money-mad business man, crazed man, average man, is 
 doing all he can to destroy the balance between .the little drops and the 
 little grains. Not only is he doing all he can to invite the successor of 
 man in the scheme of life, but he is hastening all he can that incidental 
 intermediate thing — to give it, perhaps, the only interesting form into 
 w^hich the statement can be put in the terms of commercial To-day — the 
 show-down between the American standard of living and that of other 
 peoples who never had so big a bank account as ours, and Avho, therefore, 
 learned to save. 
 
 This hymn of the soil is the one great hymn. It sings of the one great 
 heritage of life. We speak of this or that man "owning" thus or so 
 much of the earth's surface. That, of course, is impossible. He takes it 
 or borrows it, perhaps, but he can oayu no more than six feet of it, and 
 that only for a short time. The soil belongs to Life. The "buried 
 years" resent any embezzlement of our great heritage. The soil is 
 owned by plants, by animals, by men of this or that nation, this or that 
 
— 43 — 
 
 age, that past, yonder future. If we sin against the soil, ours will be the 
 Great Punishment — which is to say, extinction, oblivion. If you plow 
 badly, it is you for the star-dust ! 
 
 Even before Wall Street was invented there was more water than any- 
 thing else in the world. Finally, on the little crust of land some tiny 
 plant began to grow, no one knows just when. Perhaps at one time the 
 plant could not have told whether it was a plant or an animal, but, any- 
 how, in time it turned into some green thing which looked tempting to 
 some old Ichthyosaurus, and the latter, of a pleasant spring morning, 
 while tired of eating salt stuff and canned goods, crawled up out of the 
 water and made a meal on the first recorded salad. It looked good to 
 
 The soil of a whole valley washed away by a freshet. Observe the 
 little island of good land left In the midst of a hopeless waste 
 of cobblestones. 
 
 him and he came back. Other members of the Saurus family got on to 
 the snap and also came up out of the water, all sorts of long-tailed and 
 long-billed creatures, which, to make the story short, in time became 
 land animals. All these animals in the original balance of things not 
 only used that land, but helped to extend its total salad-producing acres. 
 They trampled, they spread seeds, they increased the soil products. 
 Vegetable mould increased. The little drops of water fell on it, and 
 plants grew again on the pleasant land. The Saurus family moved in 
 and permanently frequented the head lettuce, cabbage and turnip 
 greens of that day. 
 
 All went merry as a marriage bell, until, in time, ]\Ian came along. 
 The old ways did not suit him. He began to farm, at first by means of a 
 
— 44 — 
 
 crooked stick, and at last by means of the Harvester Trust. Inci- 
 dentally, he forgot all about the buried years, and, with a skill and speed 
 and malice which would have caused, any self-respecting Saurus to blush 
 with shame, did all he could to wreak destruction upon the forests of the 
 earth, on the mines, on the waters, and on the soil itself. He overdrew^ 
 his bank account, more in America than ever has been known in all the 
 long, slow history either of the world or of the earth. 
 
 It would not be Avorth while to make here merely a series of sweeping 
 general statements, or to make statements not definitely understandable. 
 As it happens, the chapter and verse are ready at hand. It is entirely 
 feasible not only to recognize the waste in American soil, but to measure 
 
 What happens when tlie wooded cover is removed from the land. 
 Erosion sets in ; and the land turns a bare, unsmiling face 
 toward the sky. Vegetation can get no foothold. The world 
 has lost some of its power to feed its people. 
 
 it. The late Professor N. S. Shaler estimated the destruction of agri- 
 cultural lands, chiefly through old-field erosion, in the southern Atlantic 
 and Gulf States at several thousand square miles ; and in portions of this 
 regions the waste involves a complete removal of a superficial geologic 
 deposit, well adapted to forming a productive soil, from underlying 
 older formations ill suited to the development of fertile soils and sub- 
 soils ; in which case the loss is irremediable. 
 
 Other estimates of soil-waste rest on the determination of soil-matter 
 transported by our running waters. The most extensive measurements 
 of this kind were those of Generals Humphreys and Abbott, made on the 
 Mississippi over half a. century ago. These showed that the Mississippi 
 then carried annuallv into the Gulf something' over four hundred million 
 
— 45 — 
 
 tons of solid matter, in addition to great quantities of earth-salts, carried 
 in solution, and of sand or other coarse material rolled or swept along 
 the bottom. 
 
 At the time of these determinations settlement in the Mississippi 
 Valley was comparatively limited, and, as shown by local observations 
 on different rivers, the effect of extending agriculture has been to 
 increase the soil-matter carried by the Mississippi fully twenty-five per 
 cent; while comparative determinations made on several other streams 
 indicate that the rivers of the country outside of the Mississippi basin 
 carry into the sea about as much soil-matter as the great river itself — 
 that is, that the annual soil-wash of the United States aggregates fully 
 one billion tons ! Our balance of trade is going some, isn 't it ? Also, 
 unfortunately, our soil, which raised that balance of trade, is going 
 some. 
 
 A fraction of the matter transported by the waters is coarse (sand and 
 gravel), but fully ninety per cent consists of rich soil-stuff washed from 
 the surface or leached from the subsurface of fields and pastures and 
 (in less degree) of woodlands. Reckoned on the basis of value as 
 fertilizer, the material could hardly be appraised at less than one dollar 
 per ton; so that the annual loss to the agricultural interests of the 
 country can hardly fall short of a billion dollars — equivalent to an 
 impost as great as most other taxes combined, and one yielding absolutely 
 no return. It is worse than that. Most of us have known stocks to pass 
 a dividend. How would we feel if the whole stock and everything back 
 of it were wiped out? What would we think of the management that 
 allowed such an event to happen ? But this is happening, and under our 
 own management. 
 
 The foregoing are estimates made by a United States soil expert. 
 Other competent Government authorities can offer us definite food for 
 additional thought, if we care to hearken. The greatest loss of our soil, 
 we are told, is from preventable erosion. The total soil-wash of the 
 country is a billion tons a year. This would make a pile of adobe as high 
 as the Washington Monument and a mile long on each of the four sides ! 
 Cleared and plowed lands, the source of food products, are the ones 
 which suffer. 
 
 Most of the soil-wash — at least seven hundred and eighty-five million 
 tons every twelve months, probably — is dumped into the ocean and lost 
 forever. This would fill four channels as big as the Panama Canal, 
 according to the original specifications. So says the cold-eyed soil expert. 
 
 Four hundred million tons of soil are washed from the borders of the 
 Mississippi and Missouri rivers and their tributaries every year and 
 poured as mud into the Gulf of Mexico. So says the wild-eyed Washing- 
 ton statistician. 
 
— 46 — 
 
 Muddy waters carry more impurities than clear, and so endanger 
 health more. They have greater power for cutting away the banks of 
 streams. Deposits in the channels, drifting sand-bars and changing 
 courses are caused entirely by silt in muddy streams. Had you ever 
 thought of that? Read the hymn backward. Thrown out of balance, 
 water and sand i^n-make the pleasant land. 
 
 From the State of Missouri alone enough soil is carried away annually 
 to make a prism one mile square and six hundred feet high. The 
 Missouri River bears into the Mississippi every twelve months enough 
 earth to make a mud-pile a mile square and four hundred feet high. 
 The billion tons of soil which are washed away every year would spread 
 a layer like Nile mud over Indiana, Illinois or Iowa. But what good does 
 it do buried in the depths of the mighty ocean? It may help some 
 future Saurus family, but it won't help yours. 
 
 Whole towns have been washed away by the change of currents in 
 silt-laden streams. In some neighborhoods an entire farm has been 
 taken up and carried across to the other side of a river. Within the 
 past year the town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, was threatened with 
 destruction, many of the buildings toppling over into the turbid flood. 
 
 Bad plowing is the cause of a great deal of soil-waste. The farmer 
 of America each year digs a Panama Canal with his little plow. Each 
 year he digs out of the heart of his little forty, eighty or one hundred 
 and sixty acres of land a block of dirt really bigger than the entire cut 
 of the whole Panama Canal. The riches of his farm take wings. He did 
 not see them go. He does not understand that he is literally plowing 
 his farm into the mighty ocean. Not only do we waste, hut that waste 
 accelerates each year. That is the horrible feature of all these resource- 
 wastes — they increase geometrically with awful swiftness. The buffalo 
 went ' ' all at once. ' ' The trees, the fish, the ore, will go ' ' all at once. ' ' 
 We do not like high prices, but higher prices than we now can dream 
 are coming to us Americans unless we can get down to a practical basis 
 on religion, politics and business — unless we can understand that little 
 old hymn we used to sing. 
 
 When ax and plow work together as agents of destruction and not 
 as creative influences, then we are not using good business sense. Yet 
 that is what we have done — ripped the covering from the soil, and then 
 ripped off the soil itself. In that way we destroyed a primary value. 
 In that way, also, we raised the price, cut down the supply of food, of 
 clothes, of habitation, for the average man. The average American has 
 let a few men steal him blind, and now he is stealing himself blind. The 
 soil is the connecting link between organic and inorganic life. It is the 
 foundation of organized society and of all civilization. It is not only 
 our bank account, but more — it is the place where all the bank accounts 
 come from. 
 
— 47 — 
 
 Any man who touches the soil, and even the city n^ 
 ought to understand it. The main truths are simple enou ^i, lilgg ^most 
 big things. It is easy to see that depth of soil, and therefore richness in 
 product, is inverse as to slope, because the soil washes thin on the hill- 
 sides and runs thicker on the flat. Therefore, on the flats it raises more 
 vegetation, which in turn furnishes more mulch, which in turn holds 
 more moisture, which in turn produces more vegetation. The great 
 circle of the conservation of forces is a simple and beautiful thing. 
 
 A truck garden ruined by flood. The fertile soil carried away, leaving gullies 
 in some places and great piles of driftwood and gravel in others. 
 
 Slope, water supply, organic action, all these govern soil as in the days 
 of the Saurus family. That is the Hymn of Life. Good plowing is 
 good religion. Good politics is good religion. Good business is good 
 religion. Good geology is good religion, too, and the circle runs around 
 and around, beautiful and complete, if only we care to look at it in that 
 way. 
 
 When the Government gets the little drops of water regulated in Wall 
 street, and when we begin to understand the relation of those little 
 drops and little grains on our farm, we shall begin to see in America 
 the arrival of a golden age, one of growth in art, in beauty, in mentality, 
 in altruism. Even at this stage of our development we ought to have 
 
— 48 — 
 
 intelligence equal to that of the average Ichthyosaurus. What Uncle Sam 
 is trying to show us is, that without water there is no civilization, and 
 that without proper relation of water and soil there is industrial 
 anarchy. Bad handling of water means less crops, less soil, more 
 polluted streams, more choked up channels, more floods, more waste and 
 ruin, the balance of things thrown out of plumb, and the world literally 
 turned upside-down. The Hymn of Life is one which in time the great 
 Teacher of the Universe is going to force us to remember, whether we 
 
 A rich, alluvial farm, destroyed by a freshet. 
 
 wish to remember it or not. It is not Washington, but the Universe, 
 which is handing a message to us. 
 
 What, then, ought we to do to get out of the Ichthyosaurus class and 
 to give our beneficent protective tariff something to protect? In the 
 first place, it is not up to Uncle Sam, but up to us. Louis XVI. said, 
 ''The State, it is myself!" That was in France, and some time ago. 
 The State, it is ourselves, here in America. The remedy does not begin 
 with your neighbor, but with yourself, and with you it begins as soon 
 as you realize that no bank account will stand perpetual checking 
 against it. Uncle Sam is willing to help any one of us begin the study 
 of the soil to-day. 
 
— 49 — 
 
 The soil experts of the Government are no more able to classify farms 
 than the average farmer — every farmer knows that there may be heavy, 
 sticky soil; thin, light, sandy soil; clay soil; open and friable mould. 
 Any farmer knows that the great idea is to retain the natural moisture 
 under the soil and not let it run off on the surface. The experts show 
 that deep plowing is a good thing in certain soils, to get the water down 
 into the earth. If the land is very flat, deep tilling may be necessary to 
 get this surplus water out, so that the soil may drain dry and disinte- 
 grate. Most farmers know that, in a general way; but Uncle Sam can 
 teach the average farmer a wrinkle or so as to the right balance of the 
 little drops and the little grains. 
 
 On the hillsides which wash so badly, the soil expert says, we ought 
 to study contour farming, as it is called. A "vertical or slanting furrow 
 will soon become a vertical gully. The horizontal furrow at the same 
 elevation all around the hill has, on the other hand, a tendency to stop 
 the running off of water. Great benefit, also, comes from using strips of 
 grass land, lying in bands of the same elevation around the sides of a 
 dangerous hill. Terracing of farms is new in this country, where we 
 have always just gone West instead. We see the terraces of Chinese and 
 Japanese lands, and suppose they must have been made at the expense 
 of great labor, but in reality it was Time and Nature that made them. 
 The soil which is washed out of the horizontal furrow is in part or in 
 whole stopped when it strikes the edge of the grass land. In many 
 years it banks up more and more. If not controlled it would not bank 
 up, but simply run down the hill and fly away into the mighty ocean. 
 
 In rolling lands the canny farmer plants crops toward the tops of the 
 hills to produce cover and mulch, and so to stop wash. He reserves some 
 of his bottom lands for grass, to catch the soil-wash and use it. If he 
 did not, some of his farm would run away, and not only impoverish him, 
 but, perhaps-, work injury to his neighbor. It is not good farming to 
 farm every inch of a rich bottom. A few bands of trees would break 
 the driving force of rain. The roots would stand against soil-wash and 
 regulate the flooding which make bottom farming so risky in some 
 localities. The average farmer may not believe in the sense of this, any 
 more than the average lumberman would hesitate to cut away the forest ; 
 but the fact remains. Of course, in any very broken country, so says 
 Uncle Sam, there should be forestry mixed with farming ; otherwise, the 
 rainfall goes off in torrents. Even Uncle Sam sometimes forgets this, 
 for, after establishing forest reserves, he very often leases them out as 
 sheep or goat ranges. These animals trample little paths, which soon 
 become gullies, which, in their time, become great avenues of waste. I 
 have seen mountains in New Mexico ruined by goats. 
 
 4 NR 
 
— 50 — 
 
 For fuller particulars, any anxious inquirer might do much worse 
 than refer to the Department of Agriculture, where many of these great, 
 slow problems are now under careful consideration. As to actual 
 remedy, however, nothing can be done so long as we ourselves remain 
 ignorant or careless in politics, religion and business. We must see 
 higher than the walls of our little grooves. Also, we must see about 
 us in our own little grooves. Waste begins on your own forty acres, 
 right at your door. You are the unit, the individual citizen. From you 
 it is a step up to your hundred, under the old Saxon law. Thence you 
 go to your town, your State, your National Government. Your wish can 
 prevail, if you like, at each and every step of that advance. You can 
 say to that legislator who thinks of himself and not of you, that you 
 would rather have in his place a man who stands for guarded resources, 
 for large reserves of forests, rich soil, a proper water flow, an unimpeded 
 navigation, for fair play all along the line. It all begins with you and 
 me. We have a good country and a good government, but they won't 
 run themselves. The reform of a great many things begins away this 
 side of Washington, District of Columbia. Some of it can begin in the 
 caucus, or the primary, or the forty-acre field. Common-sense and 
 enforced laws now, or the piper to pay after a while — which is better 1 
 
 At our present nice little industrial gait, here in America, we are 
 burning the candle at both ends, quite regardless of the fact that when 
 it is burnt out, it can never be renewed. Such American fortunes as 
 were made out of theft of America 's common resources must surely, one 
 day and in some way, pay the price. But let us little fellows who have 
 not ' ' succeeded ' ' in the world see to it that we keep our own hands clean. 
 
 This was a very wonderful and beautiful country. Having seen it 
 before civilization took it all over, perhaps, some of us do not care so 
 much for civilization as we might. 
 
 Perhaps some of us would rather be Indians and pray to Chief 
 Mountain, or would rather have been members of the Saurus family, 
 before there was any such thing as taxes and when potato salad was free. 
 Yet here we are, each in his little groove, and, if we have to play the 
 game, we ought to understand the game and know what the game is 
 about. 
 
 At least one truth is, we don 't own the soil. We borrow it. We ought 
 t.o hand it over to the successor of our species in as good condition as 
 when we asked the loan. The Saurus family played the game as fair 
 as that with us ; and the finest Sauri in the world were raised right here 
 in the United States. Perhaps they didn't forget the hymns they sang. 
 
— 51 — 
 
 OUR WATER POWER. 
 
 Unquestionably California 's greatest asset is her water power. Every 
 year the big, round sun lifts millions of tons from the waters of the 
 Pacific, to be carried eastward by the winds and sprinkled upon ten 
 thousand hills and valleys in the highlands of the Sierras. Slowly it 
 trickles downward, returning to the sea. It is gathered into rivulets, 
 brooks, torrents, that dash faster and faster down the deep canyons 
 and steep gorges in the western flanks of the mountains. More and more 
 we are learning to use the power of these millions of tons as they 
 descend from highlands to lowlands. This power is destined to be the 
 greatest single element in the future development of the State. It is 
 destined to turn the wheels of industry, transport people and products, 
 light and warm the homes of the whole State. It will be an absolute 
 necessity to life and prosperity when oil and coal are gone. Those who 
 control it will be the lords and rulers of mankind. 
 
 Up to date our stupid laws give away this precious power forever to 
 any one who wants it, and give him all that he wants, however much — 
 for nothing! Thus we part with our great-grandchildren's birthright, 
 and do not even get a mess of pottage in return. The descendants of 
 us who foolishly part with this power now will pay tribute for cen- 
 turies to the descendants of the men who get it. These Power Lords will 
 rule over the lives and fortunes of the millions of vassals who must have 
 the Power in order to live. 
 
 This Power should be leased, never permanently disposed of. Its 
 title is not rightly vested in us at all. It belongs to the Future. It 
 should never be granted to any one in perpetuity, but for n term of 
 years, a century, if need be ; but in perpetuity, never, [e. h.] 
 
 "BLIND MOUTHS." 
 
 An editorial from Century Magazine, November, 1907. It is a very fine 
 example of scholarly modern English. 
 
 Literature is full of trenchant expressions of the recklessness of 
 greed, such as ' ' After us, the deluge ! " " Devil-may-care ' ' and ' * Out of 
 sight, out of mind" — but none of them compares with the lightning- 
 like revelation of selfishness made by these two words of Milton's. 
 Conveying, as they do, the sense of an all-consuming appetite, the very 
 maw of darkness, they would seem to have come from the poet 's vituper- 
 ative prose, rather than from the flowing elegy of the gentle Lycidas. 
 
 ''What has posterity ever done for us that we should do anything 
 for posterity?" is a saying as striking for the falsity of its suggestion 
 as for the edge of its wit. The most obvious material and natural 
 reasons impel us to work for posterity. Our happiness consists largely 
 in procuring the happiness of our children and our grandchildren, 
 whose happiness in turn will consist in the happiness of their children 
 
— 52 — 
 
 and grandchildren. However attenuated this altruistic sentiment may 
 become with further extension, it is enough for practical purposes if it 
 shall re'ach forward four generations. We bless our ancestors for the 
 building of roads and the planting of trees, and it is what posterity 
 will do for us in the way of benediction that rightly animates any one 
 above the beasts. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that civilization 
 itself lies in the fact — and to the extent — that "out of sight" is not 
 **out of mind." 
 
 It is with the conservation of the forests that we are here concerned, 
 for without them there would be far less range to administer. Until 
 1890 our land policy was all steam and no brake. Under a false 
 individualism, due to consideration for the bona fide settler and the 
 Civil War veteran, the larger interests of the region, which included 
 their interests, were forgotten. Recklessness and waste were rampant. 
 By false entries, bribery, and local terrorism millions of acres were 
 acquired and held by individuals and corporations, and what was 
 intended for the homemaker fell into the grasp of commercial exploiters, 
 whose operations have not only left trails of devastation, but have 
 poisoned the politics of many states. 
 
 During Mr. Harrison's administration * * * came a new policy. 
 By a legislative provision, passed March 3, 1891, the President was 
 authorized to withdraw from public entry and set apart and reserve 
 in any state or territory such portions of the public lands as might in 
 his opinion be desirable for the preservation of the forests and w^aters. 
 Then began a campaign of education throughout the country so con- 
 tinuous that he must be ignorant indeed who does not know the impres- 
 sive reasons why the upland forests must be preserved. The lingering 
 tragedies of those Mediterranean countries — Greece, Italy, France, 
 Spain, and the African coast — which permitted wholesale destruction 
 of their forests, have been rehearsed for our warning 
 
 Till old Experience do attain 
 To something of prophetic strain, 
 
 while the success of the present far-sighted policies of Germany, France, 
 and other countries have been cited for our encouragement. 
 
 * * * The walnut and white pine of the Lake States are virtually 
 exhausted; the leather trust is everywhere decimating the hemlock for 
 tanbark, while the soft woods, saplings as well as larger growth, are 
 being indiscriminately devoured by the pulp mills. Meanwhile, the 
 senseless tariff on lumber tempts the rich companies to further deple- 
 tion of our resources, rather than permit the builder to buy in the 
 cheaper and inexhaustible market of Canada. Could folly further go? 
 
 Reversing the witticism, let us ask. What has posterity ever done to 
 us that we should do such things to posterity ? 
 
53 
 
 WHEN THE FORESTS ARE GONE. 
 
 Teachers of geography and others interested in such matters will find a wealth 
 of good material in a large volume by George P. Marsh entitled THE EARTH 
 AS MODIFIED BY HUMAN ACTION. The following paragraphs give a vivid 
 idea of conditions in certain parts of France. It is the part of wise people to 
 profit by the experience of others, to take warning from others' misfortunes. 
 
 "When the forest is gone, the great reservoir of moisture stored up 
 in its vegetable mould is evaporated, and returns only in deluges of rain 
 to wash away the parched dust into which that mould has been con- 
 verted. The well-wooded and humid hills are turned to ridges of dry 
 rock, the debris from which encumbers the low grounds and chokes the 
 watercourses, and — except in countries favored with an equable distri- 
 bution of rain throughout the seasons, and a moderate and regular 
 inclination of surface — the whole earth, unless rescued by human art 
 from the physical degradation to which it tends, becomes an assemblage 
 of bald mountains, of barren, turfless hills, and of swampy and 
 malarious plains. There are parts of Asia Minor, of northern Africa, 
 of Greece, and even of Alpine Europe, where the operation of causes set 
 in action by man has brought the face of the earth to a desolation 
 almost as complete as that of the moon; and though, within that brief 
 space of time which we call "the historical period," they are known to 
 have been covered with luxuriant woods, verdant pastures, and fertile 
 meadows, they are now too far deteriorated to be reclaimable by man, 
 nor can they become again fitted for human use. ' ' 
 
 "The Alps of Provence present a terrible aspect. In the more 
 equable climate of northern France, one can form no conception of 
 those parched mountain gorges, where not even a bush can be found to 
 shelter a bird, where, at most, the wanderer sees in summer here and 
 there a withered lavender, where all the springs are dried up, and where 
 a dead silence, hardly broken by even the hum of an insect, prevails. 
 But if a storm bursts forth, masses of water suddenly shoot from the 
 mountain heights into the shattered gulfs, waste without irrigating, 
 deluge without refreshing the soil they overflow in their swift descent, 
 and leave it even more seared than it Avas from want of moisture. Man 
 at last retires from the fearful desert, and I have, the present season, 
 found not a living soul in districts where I remember to have enjoyed 
 hospitality thirty years ago." 
 
 " It is certain that the productive mould of the Alps, swept off by the 
 increasing violence of that curse of the mountains, the torrents, is daily 
 diminishing with fearful rapidity. All our Alps are wholly, or in large 
 proportion, bared of wood. Their soil, scorched by the sun of Provence, 
 cut up by the hoofs of the sheep, which, not finding on the surface the 
 grass they require for their sustenance, gnaw and scratch the ground 
 
— 54 — 
 
 in search of roots to satisfy their hunger, is periodically washed and 
 carried off by melting snows and summer storms." 
 
 ' ' I will not dwell on the effects of the torrents. For sixty years they 
 have been too often depicted to require to be further discussed, but it is 
 important to show that their ravages are daily extending the rang^ of 
 devastation. The bed of the Durance, which now in some places exceeds 
 a mile and a quarter in width, and, at ordinary times, has a current 
 of water less than eleven yards wide, shows something of the extent of 
 the damage. Where ten years ago, there were still woods and cultivated 
 grounds to be seen, there is now but a vast torrent; there is not one of 
 our mountains which has not at least one torrent, and new ones are 
 daily forming. 
 
 *^In the days of the Roman Empire the Durance was a navigable, 
 or, at least, a boatable, river, with a commerce so important that the 
 boatmen upon it formed a distinct corporation. 
 
 ''Even as early as 1789 the Durance was computed to have already 
 covered with gravel and pebbles not less than 130,000 acres, which but 
 for its inundations, would have been the finest land in the province." 
 
 BEFORE AND AFTER. 
 
 Last summer I went back to visit my boyhood home in Ohio, after 
 an absence of thirty years. One of the most striking changes in the 
 landscape was in the roofs of the buildings. They were nearty all of 
 slate instead of shingles. A shingle roof was a sign that the house was 
 a very old one. Even the chicken houses and barns and woodsheds were 
 roofed with slate. 
 
 For why, wooden shingles had grown so high priced that slates could 
 be brought from a distant state to compete with them ; and the shingles 
 were all made of such knotty, brash, inferior lumber that they rotted 
 away in a short time and were not worth putting on. 
 
 Looking further, it was plain that in thirty years the state had 
 changed from a countr.y of Avood to a country of clay. Bricl^ were the 
 universal building material. Tiles were used where bricks were impos- 
 sible or undesirable. Ceramics was the most important industry of the 
 state. The lumber is gone! The wood is no more! The trees are 
 gathered to their fathers ! 
 
 I gazed in astonishment at a vast old oaken barn that had been in 
 the scenes of my childhood ; and talked with the gray-headed patriarch 
 who owned it. Its sills were beams of solid oak, 24 and 26 inches square, 
 30 and 40 feet long, and there were scores of them. Away up, high 
 above the tall haymows, were plates and beams by hundreds, all of 
 sound old oak and each big enough for the foundation of a great 
 building. The whole state now would be raked in vain to find the timber 
 
— 55 — 
 
 for that one barn. The lumber in it would be worth a huge sum now. 
 But the old man told me it had all been cut from the choice trees of 
 one field, right there — and I looked afar over a bare and treeless plain. 
 
 And all Ohio was one great, shaggy forest, only a hundred years ago — - 
 dense forests of splendid hardwoods, walnut, hickory, oak, ash, maple, 
 beech, sycamore, poplar. It was inexhaustible. The strong and hardy 
 pioneers worked like slaves early and late to cut, burn, clear the land. 
 They were sure the forests would last till the crack of doom. 
 
 Only a hundred years have passed; yet the country is bare; and 
 every springtime now we read of the devastating floods of the Ohio; 
 and the soil of the fertile farms continually goes to feed the yellow tides. 
 
 [E. H.] 
 
 A NEW PATRIOTISM. 
 
 ?* 
 
 This article from the World's Work Magazine is certainly worth thoughtful 
 reading by all Americans. Don't fail to note its fine, patriotic spirit. It is by 
 Gifford Pinchot, who has had every opportunity for twenty years to know 
 whereof he speaks. It is said that he accepts no salary for his work as chief 
 forester of the United States, but turns it back into the treasury for the good of 
 the cause, and devotes the best years of his life to a labor of love. 
 
 The people of the United States are on the verge of one of the great 
 quiet decisions which determine national destinies. Crises happen in 
 peace as well as in war, and a peaceful crisis may be as vital and con- 
 trolling as any that comes with national uprising and the clash of arms. 
 Such a crisis, uneventful and almost unperceived, is upon us now, and 
 unwittingly we are engaged in making the decision that is thus forced 
 upon us. And, so far as it has gone, our decision is wrong. Fortu- 
 nately, it is not yet final. 
 
 The question we are deciding with so little consciousness of what it 
 involves is this: What shall we do with our natural resources? Upon 
 the final answer that we shall make to it hangs the success or failure of 
 this nation in accomplishing its manifest destiny. 
 
 Few Americans will deny that it is the manifest destiny of the United 
 States to demonstrate that a democratic republic is the best form of 
 government yet devised, and that the ideals and institutions of the great 
 republic taken together must and do work out in a prosperous, contented, 
 peaceful, and righteous people ; and to exercise, through precept and 
 example, an influence for good among the nations of the world. That 
 destiny seems to us brighter and more certain of realization to-day than 
 ever before. It is true that in populajiion, in wealth, in knowledge, in 
 national efficiency generally, we have reached a place far beyond the 
 farthest hopes of the founders of the republic. Are the causes which 
 have led to our marvelous development likely to be repeated indefinitely 
 in the future, or is there a reasonable possibility, or even a probability, 
 that conditions may arise which will check our growth? 
 
— 56 — 
 
 Danger to a nation comes either from without or from within. In 
 the first great crisis of our history, the Revolution, another people 
 attempted from w ithout to halt the march of our destiny by refusing 
 to us liberty. With reasonable prudence and preparedness we need 
 never fear another such attempt. If there be danger, it is not from 
 an external source. In the second great crisis, the Civil War, a part 
 of our own people strove for an end which would have checked the 
 progress of our development. Another such attempt has become forever 
 impossible. If there be danger, it is not from a division of our people. 
 
 Our Third National Crisis. 
 
 In the third great crisis of our history, which has now come upon us 
 unawares, our whole people, unconsciously and for lack of foresight, 
 seem to have united together to deprive the nation of the great natural 
 resources without which it can not endure. This is the pressing danger 
 now, and it is not the least to which our national life has been exposed. 
 A nation deprived of liberty may win it, a nation divided may reunite, 
 but a nation whose natural resources are destroyed must inevitably pay 
 the penalty of poverty, degradation, and decay. 
 
 At first blush this may seem like an unpardonable misconception and 
 over-statement, and if it is not true it certainly is unpardonable. Let 
 us consider the facts. Some of them are well known, and the salient 
 ones can be put very briefly. 
 
 The five indispensably essential materials in our civilization are wood, 
 water, coal, iron, and agricultural products. 
 
 We have timber for less than thirty years at the present rate of 
 cutting. The figures indicate that our demands upon the forest have 
 increased twice as fast as our population. 
 
 We have anthracite coal for but fifty years, and bituminous coal for 
 one hundred. 
 
 Our supplies of iron ore, mineral oil, and natural gas are being 
 rapidly depleted, and many of the great fields are already exhausted. 
 Mineral resources such as these when once gone are gone forever. 
 
 We have allowed erosion, that great enemy of agriculture, to impov- 
 erish and, over hundreds of square miles, to destroy our farms. The 
 Mississippi alone carries yearly to the sea more than 4,000,000,000 tons 
 of the richest soil within its drainage basin. If this soil is worth a dollar 
 a ton, it is probable that the total loss of fertility from soil-wash to the 
 farmers and forest owners of the United States is not far from a billion 
 dollars a year. Our streams, in spite of the millions of dollars spent 
 upon them, are less navigable now than they were fifty years ago, and 
 the soil, lost by erosion from the farms and the deforested mountain 
 sides, is the chief reason. The great cattle and sheep ranges of the West, 
 
— 57 — 
 
 because of over-grazing, are capable, in an average year, of carrying but 
 half the stock they once could support and should still. Their condition 
 affects the price of meat in practically every city of the United States. 
 These are but a few of the more striking examples. The diversion of 
 great areas of our public lands from the home maker to the landlord 
 and the speculator, the national neglect of great water powers, which 
 might well relieve, being perennially renewed, the drain upon our 
 non-renewable coal ; the fact that but half the coal has been taken from 
 the mines which have already been abandoned as worked out and in 
 caving-in have made the rest forever inaccessible; the disuse of the 
 cheaper transportation of our waterways, which involves but little 
 demand upon our non-renewable supplies of iron ore, and the use of 
 the rail instead — these are other items in the huge bill of particulars 
 of national waste. 
 
 The Disregard of the Future. 
 
 We have a well-marked national tendency to disregard the future, 
 and it has led us to look upon all our natural resources as inexhaustible. 
 Even now that the actual exhaustion of some of them is forcing itself 
 upon us in higher prices and the greater cost of living, we are still 
 asserting, if not always in words, yet in the far stronger language of 
 action, that nevertheless and in spite of it all, they still are inex- 
 haustible. 
 
 It is this national attitude of exclusive attention to the present, this 
 absence of foresight from among the springs of national action, which 
 is directly responsible for the present condition of our natural resources. 
 It was precisely the same attitude which brought Palestine, once rich 
 and populous, to its present desert condition, and which destroyed the 
 fertility and habitability of vast areas in northern Africa and elsewhere 
 in so many of the older regions of the world. 
 
 The conservation of our natural resources is a question of primary 
 impoi;jtance on the economic side. It pays better to conserve our natural 
 resources than to destroy them, and this is especially true when the 
 national interest is considered. But the business reason, weighty and 
 worthy though it be, is not the fundamental reason. In such matters, 
 business is a poor master but a good servant. The law of self-preserva- 
 tion is higher than the law of business, and the duty of preserving the 
 nation is still higher than either. 
 
 The American Eevolution had its origin in part in economic causes, 
 and it produced economic results of tremendous reach and weight. The 
 Civil War also arose in large part from economic conditions, and it has 
 had the largest economic consequences. But in each case there was a 
 higher and more compelling reason. So with the third great crisis of 
 our history. It has an economic aspect of the largest and most perma- 
 
— 58 — 
 
 nent importance, and the motive for action along that line, once it is 
 recognized, should be more than sufficient. But that is not all. In this 
 case, too, there is a higher and more compelling reason. The question 
 of the conservation of natural resources, or national resources, does not 
 vStop with being a question of profit. It is a vital question of profit, 
 but what is still more vital, it is a question of national safety and 
 patriotism also. 
 
 We have passed the inevitable stage of the pillage of natural resources. 
 The vast wealth we found upon this continent has made us rich. We 
 have used it, as we had a right to do, but we have not stopped there. 
 We have abused, and wasted, and exhausted so much that there is the 
 gravest danger that our prosperity to-day will have been made at the 
 price of the suffering and poverty of our descendants. We may now 
 fairly ask of ourselves a reasonable care for the future and a natural 
 interest in those who are to come after us. No patriotic citizen expects 
 this nation to run its course and perish in a hundred, or two hundred, 
 or five hundred years; but, on the contrary, we expect it to grow in 
 influence and power and, what is of vastly greater importance, in the 
 happiness and prosperity of our people. But we have as little reason 
 to expect that all this will happen of itself as there would have been 
 for the men who established this nation to expect that a United States 
 would grow of itself without their efforts and sacrifices. It was their 
 duty to found this nation, and the}^ did it. It is our duty to provide 
 for its continuance in well-being and honor. That duty it seems as 
 though we might neglect. Not in willfulness, not in any lack of 
 patriotic devotion, when once our patriotism is aroused, but in mere 
 thoughtlessness and inability or unwillingness to drop the interests of 
 the moment long enough to realize that what we do now will decide 
 the future of the nation. For, if we do not take action to conserve the 
 natural resources, and that soon, our descendants will find them gone. 
 
 Let me use a homely illustration: We have all known fathers and 
 mothers, devoted to their children, whose attention was fixed and lim- 
 ited by the household routine of daily life. Such parents were actively 
 concerned with the common needs and precautions and remedies entailed 
 in bringing up a family, but blind to every threat that was at all 
 unusual. Fathers and mothers such as these often remain serenely 
 unaware while some dangerous malady or injurious habit is fastening 
 itself upon a favorite child. Once the evil is discovered, there is no 
 sacrifice too great to repair the damage which their unwitting neglect 
 may have allowed to become irreparable. So it is, I think, with the 
 people of the United States. Capable of every devotion in a recognized 
 crisis, we have yet carelessly allowed the habit of improvidence and 
 waste of resources to find lodgment. It is our great good fortune that 
 the harm is not yet altogether beyond repair. 
 
— 59 — 
 
 The profoundest duty that lies upon any father is to leave his son 
 with a reasonable equipment for the struggle of life and an untarnished 
 name. So the noblest task that confronts us all to-day is to leave this 
 country unspotted in honor, and unexhausted in resources, to our 
 descendants, who will be, not less than we, the children of the founders 
 of the republic. I conceive this task to partake of the highest spirit of 
 patriotism. 
 
 LEARNING FROM HISTORY. 
 
 The following is an extract from a paper by A. B. Benton, before the Tri- 
 counties Reforestation Committee, in Southern California. It certainly affords 
 food for thought. 
 
 The editor of one of our great weekly journals has written : ' ' Prob- 
 ably the works for which President Roosevelt will be longest remembered 
 are his efforts for the conservation of our national natural resources." 
 
 The fountains must be renewed, the field must be planted, the fire 
 must be checked, and by us or we will justly merit the contempt of 
 mankind. We are not the first, but the last of the nations who have 
 squandered their birthright. The splendid nations of old time, Egypt, 
 Babylonia, Asia Minor, Greece, India, China ; where our race began its 
 career, where the arts and letters and commerce and architecture were 
 born and flourished in glorious achievement for centuries and cen- 
 turies — do you think their lands were sterile then? Do you conceive 
 them as poorer in lavish gifts of nature than is our land? Do you 
 suppose the teeming millions of their inhabitants so prospered in the 
 deserts which we find there now? Believe me, the deserts there are of 
 men's making, and their desolation was brought about by their own 
 hands. We look on the poor ruins of these once mighty empires with a 
 complacent pity, but I have little doubt that the spirits of the men of 
 old, if they are cognizant of our doings, have greater reason for a 
 scornful pity than have we, for they began civilization and had little 
 before their time to take warning, while we, latest of all, I verily believe 
 have been as reckless as any of the great nations, ancient or modern. 
 
 There are many, even in this day, who can learn nothing from history 
 for their own profit. The world of men for thousands of years has been 
 experimenting with civilization of higher and lower types. Enough 
 of their experiences have been written to teach us every lesson we need 
 to learn had we the wit to read them aright. The treasures of ancient 
 and medieval research, their economics and philosophy have been opened 
 to this age a thousand fold more widely than to any age whatsoever 
 before us. If it, with the histories of the good and bad of all ages before 
 it, not in dead languages, nor locked in secluded temples and cloisters, 
 but in its living tongues, and in multiplied libraries — if, with all this 
 
— 60 — 
 
 before it, it follows the blunders and mistakes and follies of the old ages 
 because it will not see, and seeing learn, then our civilization deserves 
 not only to perish as miserably as the most miserable failure of them 
 all, but will richly merit the epitaph of Justice Dogberry to ' ' be written 
 down an ass ! ' ' 
 
 We voters of America are the bankers of the nation's resources. 
 Infinitely more valuable is our trust than that of money, stocks or 
 bonds, because once dissipated, it may not be replaced. If we are to 
 preserve for our children the heritage we received from our fathers, we 
 must alarm the people out of their thoughtless indifference. Public 
 thieves must be punished, fires must be checked, individual rights must 
 be purchased when demanded for the public good. Wantonness of 
 waste by careless owners and destructive greed for immediate gain by 
 selfish owners must be controlled. This is a mighty task, more difficult 
 than some of the greatest our ancestors performed in the old days. But 
 if it be not accomplished, the shame of defeat will rest on this genera- 
 tion, for this is preeminently our battle. We may not throw its burden 
 backward to our fathers, or forward to our children. The former could 
 not see its swift coming, the latter will have little to fight for if we 
 fail in preserving for ourselves and them the resources by which only 
 we or they can win continued prosperity. 
 
— 61 
 
 THE CITIES, TOO. 
 
 The following appeared only a few days ago, an editorial in a San Francisco 
 newspaper. The accompanying pictures show some of the common articles that 
 must double, treble, quadruple in price as wood grows scarce. 
 
 The Government's efforts to save the country's forests are impeded by 
 the fact that the city man, who holds the balance of political power, is 
 apt to think that the woods have nothing to do with him. This is a mis- 
 take, of course, and is worth pointing out. 
 
 It, is true that spinach and spring chickens do not grow on forest 
 trees, and that such things come to the city market without much regard 
 
 to political opinions. But the preservation of the country 's great natu- 
 ral resources of wood and stream is a political issue. And at this point 
 our cockney ignorance and complacency need to be pierced by sane rays 
 of light from the rural world. 
 
 In point of fact, the wood supply is next in importance to the food 
 supply. It is probably more indispensable than the supply of iron or 
 coal. 
 
— 62 — 
 
 The cost of living— and consequently the standard of living to which 
 city people of ordinary incomes can aspire — is seriously affected by the 
 state of the wood supply. 
 
 In view of such considerations no San Franciscan should read with 
 listless eyes such statements as those contained in a recent bulletin of the 
 National Forest Service. 
 
 We learn by this document, for example, that an average American 
 citizen uses up in a year seven times as much wood as a citizen of Ger- 
 many. And we are told that Americans produce on an acre of woodland 
 only a quarter as much as the Germans do. 
 
 We are assured by our Government experts that there is no natural 
 reason why we shouldn 't grow as good crops of trees in this country as 
 are grown anywhere in Europe. And it is plain that the improvement 
 and perpetuation of the wood supply is a matter of public education — 
 in which city people are bound to bear a leading part. 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF FORESTRY. 
 
 From Circular No. 140 of the United States Forest Service, by Treadwell 
 Cleveland, Jr. 
 
 Many people in this country think that forestry had never been tried 
 until our Government began to practice it upon the national forests. 
 Yet forestry is practiced by every civilized country in the world, except 
 China and Turkey.' It gets results which can be got in no other way, 
 and which are necessary to the general welfare. Forestry is not a new 
 thing. It was discussed two thousand years ago, and it has been studied 
 and applied with increasing thoroughness ever since. 
 
 The principles of forestry are everywhere the same. They rest on 
 natural laws, which are at work everywhere and all the time. It is 
 simply a question of how best to apply these laws to fit local needs and 
 conditions. No matter how widely countries may differ in size, climate, 
 population, industry, or government, provided only they have forests, 
 all of them must come to forestry some time as a matter of necessity. 
 # # # * * * * 
 
 The countries of Europe and Asia, taken together, have passed 
 through all the stages of forest history, and applied all the known 
 principles of forestry. They are rich in forest experience. The lessons 
 of forestry were brought home to them by hard knocks. Their forest 
 systems were built up gradually as the result of hardship. They did 
 not first spin fine theories and then apply those theories by main force. 
 On the contrary, they began by facing disagreeable facts. Every step 
 of the way toward wise forest use, the world over, has been made at the 
 sharp spur of want, suffering, or loss. As a result, the science of 
 
63 
 
 forestry is one of the most practical and most directly useful of all 
 the sciences. It is a serious work, undertaken as a measure of relief, 
 and continued as a safeguard against future calamity. 
 
 Roughly, those countries which to-day manage their forests on sound 
 principles have passed through four stages of forest experience. At 
 first the forests were so abundant as to be in the way, and so they 
 were either neglected or destroyed. Next, as settlements grew and the 
 borders of the forest receded farther and farther from the places where 
 wood was needed and 
 used, the question of 
 local wood supplies had 
 to be faced, and the 
 forest was spared or 
 even protected. Third, 
 the increasing need of 
 wood, together with 
 better knowledge of 
 the forest and its 
 growth, led to the rec- 
 ognition of the forest 
 as a crop, like agricul- 
 tural crops, which must 
 be harvested and which 
 should therefore be 
 made to grow again. 
 In this stage silvicul- 
 ture, or the manage- 
 ment of the forest so 
 as to encourage its con- 
 tinued best growth, was 
 born. Finally, as nat- 
 ural and injiustrial 
 progress led to meas- 
 ures for the general 
 welfare, including a wiser and less wasteful use of natural resources, 
 the forest was safeguarded and controlled so as to yield a constant 
 maximum product year after year and from one generation to another. 
 Systematic forestry, therefore, applied by the nation for the benefit of 
 the people, and practiced increasingly by far-sighted private citizens, 
 comes when the last lesson in the school of forest experience is mastered. 
 
 In the Sierra National Forest. The ranger's horses 
 are waiting for their master. Notice the boards 
 nailed on the trees high overhead. They mark 
 the depth of the winter snows, and show which 
 way to go when the landscape is smothered by 
 its wintry blanket. 
 
 China holds a unique position as the only civilized country which 
 has persistently destroyed its forests. What forestry has done in other 
 
64 — 
 
 countries stands out in bold relief against the background of China, 
 whose hills have been largely stripped clean of all vegetation, and whose 
 soil is almost completely at the mercy of the floods. Trees have been left 
 only where they could not be reached. Almost the sole use for lumber 
 is the manufacture of coffins. The heavy two or three inch planks for 
 this purpose are so scarce, and the cost of transporting them by coolies 
 is so high, that they sell for $2 or $3 apiece. 
 
 Nowhere in the world is the forest cleaned off down to the very soil 
 as it is in China. When the trees are gone, the saplings, the shrubs, 
 and even the herbage are taken. Slender pdles are used to build houses ; 
 inconsiderable shrubs are turned into charcoal. In the lower mountains 
 of northeastern China, where the stripping process has reached its 
 
 extreme phase, there is 
 no trace of anything 
 worthy of the name of 
 forest. In the grave- 
 yards and courts of the 
 temples a few aged 
 cedars have been pre- 
 served by the force of 
 public opinion, and pop- 
 lars and fruit trees 
 planted about dwellings 
 are protected as private 
 property by the peasant 
 owners. 
 
 In the province of 
 Shantung, where de- 
 forestation is practically 
 complete, fuel and 
 fodder for cattle are literally scratched from the hillsides by boys who 
 go out from villages with their iron rakes in autumn to secure winter 
 supplies. Grazing animals, searching every ledge and crevice, crop the 
 remaining grass down to the very roots. 
 
 A dearth of wood is not the only forlorn result of forest devastation ; 
 a dearth of water and the ruin of the soil follow in its train. In 
 western China, where forest destruction is not yet complete, enough 
 vegetation covers the mountains to retard the run-off of the rains and 
 return sufficient moisture to lower levels, where it can be reached by 
 the roots of crops and where springs are numerous. But on the waste 
 hills of eastern China the rains rush off from the barren surfaces, 
 flooding the valleys, ruining the fields, and destroying towns and 
 villages. No water is retained at the higher levels, so that none is fed 
 underground to the lower soils or to the springs. As a result, even on 
 
 In the Tahoe National Forest. The mountain 
 meadows afford continuous pasture for many 
 thousands of cattle under proper regulation. 
 Thousands upon thousands of acres of the 
 splendid pine forests about the lake have been 
 cut down and carried down into the bowels of 
 the earth in the mines of the Comstock Lode. 
 
— 65 — 
 
 the plains the water level is too far beneath the surface to be used. 
 Without irrigation and the ingenious terracing of hillsides, by which 
 the rains are made to wash the soil into thousands of miniature fields 
 whose edges are propped up by walls, agriculture would be entirely 
 impossible. Even irrigation calls for the immense labor of drawing 
 the needed water from wells. 
 
 b ^....^kiMk..^ 
 
 
 
 im 
 
 
 
 
 .» ■'- '" ■*,' 
 
 '^d^ -" 
 
 .^^...u.,.., ^,^^:z.-^=ZS^^ ■ 
 
 pW^SBPiHP'^^^^^^W^^ " 
 
 '^ '"-jfi 
 
 ;rr-'ii flT:fS;^::;=:^s*^ 
 
 Ife^^^nls^^"' 
 
 Logging under proper principles of forestry. The young trees are uninjured, the 
 brush is piled for burning, some heed is taken to the future. 
 
 In a word, the Chinese, by forest waste, have brought upon themselves 
 two costly calamities — floods and water famine. 
 
 WHY IS THIS? 
 
 As these words are written (January, 1909), the richest agricultural 
 region of California is being devastated by flood. The Sacramento 
 Eiver stands over twenty-nine feet above low-water mark at the Capital 
 of the State — the highest that it has ever been. The fertile islands in 
 the vast delta of the Sacramento-San Joaquin river system are one by 
 one going under the waves, although their levees are higher than ever 
 before, although they were built up and patrolled and fought for with 
 all the determination, enterprise, devotion that human nature is capable 
 of. Tens of thousands of acres already are lost. 
 
 Why is this? Why should the waters be higher than ever before? 
 
 -NR 
 
— ee- 
 ls the rainfall greater ? Is there more snow than in bygone years ? No. 
 The reason lies in the folly and improvidence of man. We cut and burn 
 away the forest cover on the Sierras so that they can no longer hold 
 back the waters for the summer streams. We wash the soil upon which 
 our future prosperity depends into the channels of our rivers, choking 
 them and raising them above the level of the land. [e. h.] 
 
 THE VITAL TRUTH. 
 
 Stewart Edward White, the noted writer of camping and outdoor stories, lives 
 in Santa Barbara. Even his honeymoon was spent in the open, in a horseback 
 trip through the high Sierras round about Mount Whitney. He has written a 
 fine article for the American Magazine for January, 1908, under the caption 
 THE FIGHT FOR THE FORESTS, from which the following is extracted, by 
 permission. 
 
 ''When a man makes his camp in the wilderness he hunts first of all 
 two requisites. If they exist in abundance, he is happy and comfort- 
 able; if they lack, he 
 must take his rest, and 
 move on to more fa- 
 vored localities. These 
 two requisites are wood 
 and water. 
 
 And, curiously 
 enough, these two neces- 
 sities of man's abiding 
 depend absolutely one 
 on the other. Without 
 rainfall the forests will 
 not grow. Without the 
 forests the rainfall is 
 destructive, rather than 
 beneficent. In a naked 
 country — whether arti- 
 ficially or naturally so- 
 — the water comes in 
 great torrential floods; 
 followed by droughts. 
 A covering of forest,, 
 on the other hand, re- 
 tains the rainfall a» 
 would a sponge, dis- 
 tributing it slowly 
 
 How the forests hold back the water and check the through regulated 
 
 banks a"wa^^^^ ^^^ streams from washing their streams, holding it back 
 
A hill that has lost its wooded cover, and is therefore losing Its soil by erosion. 
 Nothing here to check the floods, or hold back the life-giving water. 
 
 This mountain slope was logged over many years ago. Observe that it does not 
 reproduce forest cover, but remains a bare, parched region, at the mercy of 
 -. ., sudden flood- and , sunurier heat. , 
 
— 68 — 
 
 against the needs of the dry season. Wherever the forests have been 
 cut away, we are treated each spring to destructive floods, as has been 
 many times proven in the valleys of those great rivers draining the sites 
 
 ;¥.*^A>*!^ 
 
 '^m^j^^j^k-'k 
 
 'Z o 
 ^- o 
 
 lb 
 
 of the old pine forests in the East. Contrariwise, in California, where 
 the necessities of irrigation cause the people to pay great attention to 
 such matters, it has been found by actual measurement that the stream- 
 flow has increased twenty-five per cent since the establishment of efficient 
 I>rotection for the forest cover. 
 
— '69 — 
 
 Since these things are so, it follows naturally that sooner or later 
 nations would see through the haze of immediate expediency to the vital 
 truth, forced home boldly on the individual camper. From this realiza- 
 tion would come a system of forestry. 
 
 In Switzerland we find the earliest intelligent treatment of the ques- 
 tion. Switzerland's mountainous situation would have rendered her 
 peculiarly liable to complete extinction by flood, avalanche and the 
 erosion of the agricultural soil, once the natural protection was removed. 
 But to-day Switzerland is prosperous and very much alive. Over one 
 thousand years ago she possessed a forest system, and had developed a 
 scientific forestry by the fifteenth century. As early as Louis XIV. 
 France awoke to the fact that her forests and her life were draining 
 away together. But it was too late. To-day she is spending $34 an 
 acre to reforest her watersheds. The same experience is costing Italy 
 $20 an acre. Italy is not a wealthy nation; yet she is appropriating 
 cheerfully this enormous sum in the realization that on it depends the 
 question as to whether or not she w411 have to strike her tents. If we 
 of the United States were called upon to replace at even Italy's figure 
 the trees now growing on the watersheds protected by our reserves, we 
 should have to spend about three billion dollars! 
 
 Only a few years ago the forest was our enemy here in America. 
 Every step of the way must be cleared by the pioneer 's axe and guarded 
 by his rifle. A tree was a foe to be got rid of as expeditiously as 
 possible. To ingrained and inherited hostility succeeded indifference, 
 which is but just beginning to yield ground to a more enlightened senti- 
 ment. This enlightened sentiment further encounters determined and 
 unscrupulous opposition from the land-grabbers, the lumber stealers, 
 the candidates for free grazing, and all the rest of the various pirates 
 and parasites that prey upon and cling to the rich spoils of our public 
 domain. 
 
 OUR NEIGHBOR'S FORESTS. 
 
 The Government of British Columbia has put into forest reserves at 
 one strike a hundred and fifty million acres — five eighths of all the land 
 in the province. In British Columbia the lumberman who wishes to 
 cut trees must deal with the Government, whose enlightened policy, 
 giving the people the control of tlieir timber resources, is carried out 
 by the local government of the province, unlike some of our Western 
 States, which hang back in sullen protest while salvation is forced upon 
 them by a distant national authority. 
 
— 70 — 
 
 CALIFORNIA TAN OAKS. 
 
 One of the most shocking sights in the waste of the fuel resources of 
 this State is the method of harvesting tanbark. Thousands of square 
 miles of our north coast region were covered by fine oak trees. To get 
 the bark the trees are first cut down and then peeled. The bark is taken 
 out by wagons or pack animals and sold by the cord. But the trees 
 themselves — the massive trunks and limbs — are left to rot unseen in 
 the undergrowth or to feed a forest fire. Millions of feet of solid oak 
 timber w^ere thus destroyed" every year. The lumber corporations, in 
 buying up timber land, figure the oak trees in cords of tanhark — the 
 trees themselves count as nothing. The profit on the bark is not large, 
 as it takes a deal of labor to "'et it out. [e. h.] 
 
 A CONTINENT DESPOILED. 
 
 Rudolf Cronau is a well-known artist and writer, of German ancestry. Under 
 the above title he has written a vivid article in the American Magazine for April, 
 with the following introduction. 
 
 On my writing-desk lies a pile of photographs, some taken with my 
 own camera, some obtained from friends or through the courtesy of the 
 United States Forest Service and the Geological Survey. Besides, there 
 are maps and papers covered with statistic figures. 
 
 If you look over this collection, you will be struck with horror, for 
 these views disclose scenes so repulsive, that, if they were not photo- 
 graphs, you would believe them products of the sickly brain of some 
 artist like the famous Belgian painter "Wuerz, or the Russian Were- 
 schagin, who, with cruel pleasure, indulged in portraying only the most 
 unpleasant and disgusting scenes of this world. 
 
 Let us take up a few of these photographs. 
 
 Here we have the gloomy view of a forest destroyed by fire. As far 
 as the eye can penetrate the picture, you see hundreds and thousands 
 of straight black trunks, pointing as so many big needles toward heaven. 
 There is not a limb left on one of the trees. Everj^ branch is eaten 
 away. And not a living thing is seen in this dreadful wilderness, nor 
 will anything flourish there for years to come. 
 
 This second picture discloses another scene of devastation ; a primeval 
 forest as it was left by lumbermen after they had taken out the choice 
 timber. What reckless barbarians these men have been ! Everywhere 
 we see the unmistakable evidences of frightful waste. The ground is 
 covered with fragments of noble trees, and with young saplings crushed 
 to pieces by fallen timber. 
 
 The next photographs show deforested hillsides and farm-lands, dam- 
 aged by rain-storms which gnawed deep gullies into the naked ground 
 
— 71 — 
 
 and carried away all fruitful soil. And here we have villages and cities 
 suffering by the flood of rivers. The water reaches into the first and 
 second stories. Mills and houses have been swept away and landed on 
 distant places. 
 
 After that we look into a bird 's nest, in which we see a heap of young 
 birds, dead from starvation. Another of these ghastly photographs 
 affords a glance over rocky shores, strewn with the putrid bodies of thou- 
 sands and thousands of seal pups, who perished while waiting in vain for 
 the return of their slain mothers. 
 
 And then we see horrible views showing long rows of human corpses, 
 distorted by explosions, burned by fire, crushed by fallen rocks, or 
 maimed by railway engines or street cars. 
 
 There are dozens and dozens of such repulsive photographs. If 
 thrown as lantern slides upon a screen and explained by a lecturer, this 
 collection of views, maps, and figures would cause a cry of terror among 
 the panic-stricken audience, and many, shocked to the bottom of their 
 hearts, would leave, never to forget that horrible exhibition. 
 
 You ask where these photographs have been taken and what the whole 
 collection means. As an American citizen, I feel ashamed to say that all" 
 these views, without exception, were made from actual scenes in the 
 United States, and that, together with the maps and statistic tables, they 
 are incontrovertible and convicting evidences of grave sins of which our 
 nation is guilty. Some of the material has been used in preparing my 
 little book, "Our Wasteful Nation," which is not an outcome of yellow 
 journalism, dealing in sensations, but the honest work of a man who 
 loves this country fervently as any native-born American, and who is 
 inspired by the wish to help it along, that it some day may gain the 
 proud title, the best among all lands. 
 
 Perhaps native-born American writers are so accustomed to the 
 extravagance of American life, that they fail to see the amazing amount 
 of our prodigality, which to the stranger becomes evident at once. 
 
 THE WATERFOWL. 
 
 Another of California 's resources that is being rapidly gathered to its 
 fathers is the wild game, particularly the waterfowl. A few years ago 
 they seemed as "inexhaustible" as the leaves on the trees. But now 
 100,000 licenses to hunt are taken out in a year. If each of these guns 
 should bring down the limit for only one day, it would mount up to a 
 total of millions. In the Sacramento Valley four men have killed 700 
 geese in a day. The "bull hunters" of Merced County often kill over 
 a hundred ducks at a single discharge. Nearly every day during the 
 hunting season at Los Banos a dray load of ducks goes away by express, 
 packed in gunny sacks, the legal limit — 35 ducks — in each sack. 
 
— 72 — 
 
 Of course, this valuable resource will 8oon disappear under such 
 onslaughts. Of course, the "Game Hogs" should be suppressed, the 
 game commission should be upheld, the laws should be enforced, so that 
 wild fowl will not entirely disappear from our inland waters. 
 
 The same things may be said of our fishes. It does not seem possible 
 that so delicious and valuable a fish as the salmon would be killed and 
 
 A Single Gunner and His Kill 
 
 In the lowlands of California it is often said that a man can kill so many birds he 
 
 "can't get them all in one pile." 
 
 used for such gross purpose as fertilizer ; yet in the early days of the 
 northwest the farmers planted a splendid salmon under each hill of 
 their hop fields, to enrich the soil. In 1906 the Alaska Guano Company 
 converted 18,000 barrels of salmon and 33,500 barrels of herring into 
 fertilizer and sold it. 
 
 The heroic efforts of the Fish Commissioners can hardly hope to keep 
 pace with the reckless and illegal fishing of the fish hog and the market 
 fisherman, [e. h.] 
 
— 73 — 
 
 FUTURE OF MAN IN AMERICA. 
 
 One of the wisest and best informed men of our country is President Van Hise 
 of the University of Wisconsin. Since this work has been in press (June, '09) he 
 has printed in the World's Work Magazine a comprehensive article on Conser- 
 vation, which closes as follows: 
 
 ' ' It would be interesting, but idle, to prophesy as to the changes in our 
 social structure which will result when people begin to be pinched by 
 meagre soil, by lack of sufficient coal and wood. The people of that time 
 will doubtless solve their problems as best they may, and any specula- 
 tions we might make at this time would certainly be far from future 
 realization, but that the problems of pinching economy will confront our 
 descendants is beyond all question ; and, therefore, the paramount duty 
 remains to us to transmit to our descendants the resources which nature 
 has bequeathed to us as nearly undiminished in amount as is possible, 
 consistent with living a rational and frugal life. Now that we have 
 imposed upon us the responsibility of knowledge, to do less than this 
 w^ould be a base communal crime. ' ' 
 
 A PRACTICAL VIEW. 
 
 From an article by H. Von Schon, a hard-headed working engineer, in 
 Engineering Magazine, October, 1908. 
 
 "A bare, hard-baked surface absorbs but little water; a forested 
 area with its deep layer of leaves, brush and humus is a sponge which 
 becomes saturated with the water; it is a natural storage reservoir. 
 The rapid storm surface run-off erodes the top soil and carries it in 
 suspension, dropping it somewhere in the lower channels; timbered 
 slopes obstruct this surface run-off ; it gathers force but slowly ; it finds 
 no loose earth or gravel to carry along ; the foliage canopy of the trees 
 breaks the force of the downpouring rain, which reaches the ground 
 gradually; finally, the snowfall on the open hillsides melts quickly 
 under the influence of the wind and the sun, while that in the forest 
 remains to melt gradually and then to sink into the ground. 
 
 "That water waste with its collateral flood destructions of life and 
 property, the constantly increasing erosions of the fruitful top soil, 
 and the consequent impoverishing of what remains, and the sedimenta- 
 tion of river channels, are primarily caused by the cutting away of 
 the forests in the headwater regions of rivers, was recognized and acted 
 upon by some of the European peoples hundreds of years ago; little 
 Switzerland enacted a forest-conservation statute as early as 1680, 
 which has been enforced in a most business-like manner since; 20 per 
 cent of the mountain republic's area is in conserved forests, some 
 
— 74 — 
 
 2,000,000 acres; the cost of maintenance and supervision is $1.32 and 
 the net revenue, $2.25 per acre annually. 
 
 ''Germany's forest area is 35,000,000 acres; its system of forest 
 preservation was inaugurated one hundred and fifty years ago. France 
 has 23,000,000 acres of forests, all under admirable preserve laws. The 
 combined population of these two countries exceeds that of the United 
 States about 15,000,000. They now expend annually on forest preser- 
 vation some $11,000,000 and enjoy a net revenue of about $30,000,000, 
 while the United States forestry expenditures last year aggregated 
 $1,400,000 and the revenue $130,000." 
 
 THE SLAUGHTER OF THE TREES. 
 
 [Copyright, 1908, by the Ridgeway Company.] 
 
 Part of a striking and vivid article by Emerson Hough in the May number 
 of Everybody's Magazine. Its startling statements appear to be substantially 
 correct. Everybody's has kindly given permission to use this article and several 
 of the pictures accompanying it. 
 
 In fifty years we shall have whole States as bare as China. The 
 Appalachians will be stripped to bedrock. The Rockies will send 
 down vast floods, which can not be controlled. The Canadian forests 
 north of the Great Lakes will be swept away. Our Middle West will 
 be bare. The Yazoo Delta will be ripped apart, because no levee will 
 be able to stand the floods of those days. We shall be living in 
 crowded concrete houses, and at double the rent we now pay. We 
 shall make vehicles of steel, use no wood on our farms. We shall 
 pay ten cents for a newspaper, flfty cents for a magazine, as much 
 for a lead pencil. Cotton will be immensely higher. Beef will be 
 the privilege of the few. Clothing will cost twice what it costs 
 to-day. Like Chinamen, our children will rake the soil for fuel or 
 forage or food. We shall shiver in a cold, and burn in a heat, never 
 before felt in this temperate zone, meant by God as a comfortable 
 growing place for splendid human beings — UNLESS WE WAKE UP. 
 
 My friend, yesterday a man took the meat from your table. To-day 
 a man burned down your house. Do you care? 
 
 My friend, yesterday this was America, a rich and beautiful land. 
 To-day much of it is a waste and a wilderness. Is that anything to 
 you and me? 
 
 My brother, in ten years a man is going to force you to rent a house 
 of him, and to pay double what you do now. In twenty years very few 
 of us will be able to afford even rented houses. In thirty years America 
 will no longer be able to build houses of wood — unless you shall mean- 
 time remember that you own America, you who found it, fought for it, 
 
— 75 — 
 
 and who ought to have a pride in it, if only for the sake of what it 
 might have been. Does this cause you any personal concern ? 
 
 My friend, before a certain great revolution, the peasants who could 
 not own timber of their own, gleaned firewood in the forests of nobles, 
 who swept their backs with the lash of insolence. In England men once 
 prized the scant right to reap with peasant's billhook or shepherd's 
 crook as high as they could reach among the dead branches of the trees. 
 Soon you will perhaps fight among your kind and kin for the right to 
 glean in another man's forest by hook or crook — ^you, who but now 
 owned the widest and richest forests in the world. Po you care ? 
 
 In Europe one may not fell a tree without paying, without asking. 
 As Americans, we laugh at such restrictions. We are fools. Do you 
 care? We call this the land of the free. It is not such now. We 
 boasted of our land of opportunity open to all the world, but oppor- 
 tunity has been taken from the average man. Do you object ? 
 
 Do you think such statements as these sensational, brutal, coarse? 
 My brother, what pen shall be so bitter and abominable as shall make 
 you writhe and say, ' ' This is not true, ' ' and then make you look around 
 and find that it all is true, and more is true ? 
 
 When we first owned this country, one half of its total area was 
 ■covered with the grandest forests that ever grew in any portion of the 
 world — the richest, the most useful, the most valuable for the building 
 of a civilization. Yes, we had trees. We had forests that set the first 
 writers who saw this country wild with admiration, men who came here 
 from reforested Europe. They were all ours. Now they are gone. 
 Are they reared in lasting structures of a great civilization? No; at 
 least one half of them are ashes or rotted mould. Half of what we have 
 left to-day also will be ashes or rotted mould. They will never rest in 
 the beams and walls of abiding homes. 
 
 Had we gone on across this continent and left the remnants of our 
 standing woods, we still should have abundance ; but we have gone back 
 a second and a third time, gleaning more exactly each little bit of wood, 
 until we have reaped our forests as sheep reap the grass lands, leaving 
 nothing behind to grow. We have used ever-increasing appliances for 
 speed and thoroughness, to supply an ever-increasing demand, at an 
 ever-increasing price. We are converging in ever-increasing numbers, 
 with an ever-increasing zeal, upon what is left ; and in our haste to get 
 it all, we are permitting an ever-increasing waste and ruin of the origi- 
 nal supply. 
 
 Our very classification shows how sweeping has been the devastation. 
 We now classify as "pine" all sorts of pine — Norway pine. Jack pine, 
 pitch pine — although we know that true white pine, once the only wood 
 dignified with the name, is, as a great lumber tree, practically an 
 extinct species. As to the hardwoods, twenty years ago we used only 
 
— 76 — 
 
 oak, walnut, hickory, cherry, maple, birch; now we add cottonwood, 
 beech, sycamore, all sorts of gum trees, anything that will saw into a 
 board. The desolation in the hardwood forests of the South is as 
 unspeakable as in the pine forests of the North. Stave-makers, tie 
 cutters, vehicle and machinery makers, have ripped open the hardwood 
 regions of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas, until the end is as 
 close there as it is in the vaster pine woods. 
 
 On the Pacific coast we used not long ago only the finest of redwood, 
 gradually then the Douglas fir or spruce. Now we cut in the West 
 hemlock, cedar, lodge-pole pine, anything that will hold a saw blade. 
 For a long time we thought these great Western stores exhaustless, just 
 as not long ago we thought the forests of Michigan and Wisconsin 
 exhaustless, where now remains in great part only a horrible wilderness. 
 
 All the time poorer species and grades of timber are employed all 
 over America, East and West. All the time the ''estimates" of our 
 remaining timber increase. But all the time the standing trees them- 
 selves decrease; all the time the fires rage; all the time the waste goes 
 on, immense logs, the butts of giant trees, being left in the woods to 
 rot because it does not pay to get them out of the woods ' ' at the present 
 price of lumber." All the time the loss to the people of America goes 
 on, and the price to the people of America goes up ; and all the time 
 the people of America either do not know or do not care. 
 
 We ought to care, and if we know the facts no doubt we should care. 
 What, then, are some of the facts? Plenty of facts, and very obvious 
 ones, lie at hand for any one interested in any sort of building or 
 manufacture requiring, the use of lumber. What was $8 or $10 is now 
 worth $25 to $30 a thousand. Ordinary clear building and finishing 
 lumber costs from $30 to $125 a thousand. The price of all lumber has 
 in five years risen over fifty per cent. We use lumber now that twenty 
 years ago would have been rejected with scorn by any builder. Yet 
 prices are going up, and still up ; and the lumbermen wish these prices 
 *' protected," and ask that the Sherman law be revoked. In spite of 
 these facts, the professional optimist in lumber attempts to soothe us 
 with the assurance that there is plenty of timber ' ' farther west ' ' ; that 
 it will last ''indefinitely" at the "present rate." 
 
 But the lumberman bases all his timber estimates on the present rate 
 of cutting and on the present rate of demand. True, no one can 
 prophesy or estimate the accelerated, the cumulative demand of the 
 future. Decade after decade of our past has shown us that we could 
 not dream big enough to cover the actual figures of this demand. Yet 
 this unestimated factor is the element of danger for the future. 
 
 The lumberman does not figure on the million or more of immigrants 
 we take in each year to house, not to mention an occasional American 
 native born. Worst and most absurd of all, he figures on the timber 
 
— 77 — 
 
 supply lasting on the basis of its all being used. Yet of all the timber 
 now left standing in America, to represent our entire future supply, 
 this lumberman, judged hy his record, will use less than one half. The 
 other half will never be taken out of the woods at all. Three fourths 
 of that half may never even be cut, but may be set on fire and burned 
 as it stands. Much as we had in forest resources in the past, we never 
 could afford to have lumbering operations destroy as much as they 
 sawed. But that is what they did. What should be our attitude to-day 
 toward the threatening destruction of one half of our alarmingly small 
 remaining supply? 
 
 Last year we cut nearly forty billion (40,000,000,000) feet of lumber, 
 board measure. It may be interesting to know in wh^t proportions the 
 different states furnished this supply. In relative order a partial list 
 is as follows : Washington, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, J\lississippi, 
 Arkansas, Minnesota, Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon, California, North 
 Carolina, and so down. To-day Washington furnishes 11.5 per cent of 
 our lumber, and Louisiana 7.4 per cent. Let us look now at some of 
 the demands for trees that at first might seem unimportant. 
 
 Our railroads are said to use one third of the industrial timber cut. 
 They require, on the basis of present demand, 100,000,000 ties per 
 year, and they are always wondering where they are going to get them. 
 The demand is for better ties, not poorer. Bad ties mean wholesale 
 murder, forfeiture of mail contracts, reduced dividends. A tie contains 
 about thirty-five feet of wood. All sorts of wood are now being used 
 for ties, from hemlock at twenty-eight cents to white oak at fifty-one 
 cents, an average of forty-seven cents per tie. Suppose we could cut 
 one hundred ties to the acre ; we should require a million acres a year 
 for ties. Hardwood grows, under favorable conditions, a little more 
 than forty cubic feet per acre per year. Not a very fast crop, is it? 
 Railroad men sincerely wish it might be faster. The Santa Fe road 
 has recently arranged to plant a few thousand acres with eucalyptus, 
 from which it will some time make ties. Each road now has its tie 
 lands. These lands no longer furnish a public supply of lumber. 
 
 Alongside the ties run the telegraph poles, not so perishable, but 
 requiring continual renewal. Two years ago we cut 3,526,875 poles 
 over twenty feet in length. Three fifths of these were cedar, 28 per cent 
 chestnut. We cut hundreds of thousands of smaller poles, also, not to 
 mention vast quantities of what is called lodge-pole pine, for other uses. 
 We annually reap for telegraph and telephone poles somewhere between 
 three and four million acres of land. 
 
 Our tanneries two years ago required 1,370,000 cords of bark. In 
 the same year we cut 11,858,260 shingles and 3,812,807 laths. This 
 represents one of the real savings in lumber manufacture — the utiliza- 
 tion of material much of which otherwise would go to waste. Then we 
 
78 — 
 
 had to timber our mines, and for that we used 165,000,000 cubic feet, 
 not board measure, much of which w^as the best of hardwood. 
 
 If you stood on the top of a tower in the greatest hardwood forests of 
 the South, one sweep of the scythe of civilization would mow it farther 
 than you could see, for one month's use in vehicles, manufactured furni- 
 ture, and farm implements. Prices for this kind of wood have risen 
 from 25 to 65 per cent since 1899. In seven years the production of 
 hardwood has fallen off 15 per cent ; and those were the six years of its 
 greatest demand. 
 
 There is absolutely no hope for vehicle and machine makers except a 
 more careful use of the hardwood forests of the South and the South- 
 east; nor indeed can 
 that be called a solution 
 now. In these forests 
 grow also many softer 
 woods, once scorned. 
 Continually we adjust, 
 compromise, become 
 European and not 
 American. Tight-barrel 
 cooperage is a heavy 
 drain on white oak. In 
 1906 we made 267 mil- 
 lion tight-barrel staves. 
 We sent to Europe last 
 year about five million 
 dollars' worth of white 
 oak staves. Meantime, 
 California can not get 
 casks for her wine, be- 
 cause white oak now 
 costs too much to ship to 
 California. She is trying redwood for wine casks now, and grumbling 
 mightily. Slack-barrel cooperage in elm, gum, beech, basswood, and 
 fourteen other woods not long ago thought worthless, cut 1,097,063,000 
 staves in one year. All these little demands foot up an enormous and 
 menacing total in acreage. 
 
 The- highest estimate of our remaining hardwood is fovir hundred 
 billion feet. For lumber, ties, posts, manufactures, fuel, etc., we use 
 twenty-five billion feet per annum or more. At that rate it will take us 
 sixteen years to use up all the rest of our hardwood — if we do not burn 
 it, and if the demand remains the same ! A pleasant prospect, is it not T 
 Some one has figured that a big Sunday newspaper needs twenty 
 acres of pulp wood to make the paper for one edition. The Chicago 
 
 Waste of timber in the Yellowstone Park, 
 descendants will bitterly rue this loss. 
 
 Oui 
 
— 79 — ■ 
 
 Tribune, a chance instance, uses 200,000 pounds of paper each Sunday, 
 or 400,000 each week. Do your own multiplying. We used of domestic 
 spruce alone for pulp wood in one year 1,785,680 cords. The average 
 stand of spruce pulp wood in the regions where it is cut is probably 
 about ten cords per acre; so that of such spruce land we require at 
 least 178,500 acres annually. A ton of paper takes about two cords of 
 spruce in the making — to be exact, about 1,750 pounds of paper pulp. 
 We use other woods for pulp now, hemlock, balsam, pine, poplar; 
 
 Slaughter of the forest. An old burn. Picture the frightful waste of good wood when 
 a great forest region is reduced to this by repeated burnings. It has never 
 been cut. 
 
 3,661,176 cords was our total for 1906. We used in that year 2,327,844 
 tons of pulp. Since each ton probably cost on the average two cords of 
 some sort of wood, not allowing anything for waste, there were over four 
 million cords cut somewhere, mostly in the United States ; which means 
 something like a million acres a year for pulp. Call it a half million 
 for close measure. Do some figuring. If it costs twenty acres a Sunday, 
 or forty acres a week, or 2,080 acres a year to print one daily news- 
 paper, what does it cost in acreage to print all the newspapers in all 
 the cities and towns of America? Add to this the enormous editions 
 of our magazines. Add to this the paper used in books. The total 
 staggers the imagination, and yet the amount of timber cut for pulp 
 
— 80 — 
 
 in the United States annually is less than 5 per cent of what is cut 
 for lumber. 
 
 It would seem that we can not afford much longer to read. Neither 
 shall we long be able to write. Last year we made more than 315,000,000 
 lead pencils. A lead pencil is not very large, but the total number of 
 lead pencils required 7,300,000 cubic feet of cedar. We have cedar 
 enough to last us just twelve years. 
 
 More than 100,000 acres of timber in the whole United States are cut 
 
 Slaughter of the forest. The trees are chopped down, peeled, and then the whole 
 surface of the forest is burnt to the hone, so that the logs may be easily and 
 cheaply dragged out. 
 
 over every working day. We use many times more timber per capita 
 than any other nation. 
 
 We have left not over 450,000,000 acres bearing commercial timber. 
 Cast up in your mind some of the small demands of industry noted 
 above. Multiply this by three or four to represent the total, including 
 all sorts of sawn lumber. Remember that you are dealing in terms of 
 millions of acres. Divide 450,000,000 by your total number of millions 
 of known demand. What is the result? Do you find it pleasant? Do 
 you remain willing to listen to the charming of those who are either 
 ignorant or hypocritical in their "estimates?" 
 
81 — 
 
 THE CONVENTION OF GOVERNORS. 
 
 THE first conference of the Governors of the United States 
 and Territories was held at the White House, in Wash- 
 ington, D. C, during the three days beginning May 13, 
 1908. 
 
 The East Room was prepared for the occasion, its severe 
 simplicity somewhat brightened by draperies of green velvet 
 on the walls, about the platform on which were seated the pre- 
 siding officer, the speakers, the Supreme Court, and the Presi- 
 dent 's Cabinet. Two great maps, the largest ever made by 
 mechanical means, hung on the east wall. One showed the 
 timber resources of the United States, while the other showed 
 the mineral deposits. Between these maps was an arrangement 
 for illustrating the different phases of conservation by means 
 of superb transparencies. On the floor special chairs were 
 arranged in semi-circles for the Governors; while to the rear 
 and at the sides were seats for the Governor's advisers and 
 the guests. 
 
 Practically all the states and territories were represented; 
 it was a historic occasion ; nearly every speaker laid stress on 
 the declaration that the meeting was an epoch-making one, that 
 from it would spring an organization of the Governors that 
 through its deliberations and the weight of its opinions would 
 exercise through the years to come a tremendous influence 
 over the destinies and the affairs of the nation. 
 
 Some extracts from the most notable of the many addresses 
 delivered at this famous conference will be appropriate here as 
 a fittino" close to our handbook on Conservation.- 
 
 -NR 
 
— 82 — 
 
 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MEETING. 
 
 The savage knows and confesses his dependence upon the forces of 
 nature. His whole life is circumscribed by the resources of forest, 
 field, and stream. Indeed, he feels himself a part of nature, and 
 scarcely separates his fate from that of his surroundings. The game 
 of the prairie, the forest, and the river, the berries and herbs in their 
 season, and the living waters supply him with food and drink. With 
 the changing seasons he moves from place to place, pursuing plenty. 
 He winters in rude huts filled with smoke from fires of fallen wood, 
 hardly less at the mercy of the cold than are the hibernating animals. 
 In the spring he wakes with nature, and his summers are prosperous 
 and happy only as the wild crops of field and forest are plentiful. He 
 rises and lies down with the sun. He survives only as he observes nature 
 and fits himself to her ways. 
 
 But as savagery gives place to civilization, man frees himself more and 
 more from those bonds which bound him so closely to nature. Slowly 
 and painfully at first, and then far more rapidly and easily, he learns 
 to control his material surroundings. He breaks the prairie with the 
 plow, makes the beasts of the field his servants, strikes the pick into the 
 mountain and the axe into the veteran of the forest. He now no 
 longer waits upon the seasons. He builds himself a house against the 
 cold and warms himself to the point of comfort in the midst of the 
 winter blast. Instead of passively accepting the wild fruits as they 
 ripen he compels the soil to yield a harvest a millionfold more abundant, 
 and this harvest he stores up against days of want. Instead of migrat- 
 ing with the birds he fixes his home where he will, and pursues his 
 work and his pleasure in his own time. 
 
 Discovery and invention place new implements in his hands. With 
 his intelligence quickened and his body trained by new experience and 
 new occupations, he continues to increase his mastery over time, tem- 
 perature, and place. New material riches become available. He is able 
 to satisfy his wants more readily and more certainly than ever before. 
 The standard of his living is raised. He now possesses and enjoys, 
 besides all that his fathers required, a host of things of which they knew 
 nothing. Wants multiply with prosperity, till his life becomes highly 
 complex. He is lord of nature, because he has learned how to appro- 
 priate her resources. 
 
 But if the resources of nature should fail, where Avould be his 
 mastery then? 
 
 This is the point ^vhich we commonly overlook. Man has laid nature 
 under tribute, and has become powerful because nature was rich. 
 Impoverish nature and her tribute stops. Ingenuity, capacity, labor. 
 
— 83 — 
 
 are incapable of extracting wealth from the gutted mine, from the lire- 
 scorched brush land, from the sun-baked stream bed, from the impover- 
 ished soil. Civilization is achieved by the use of the resources of nature ; 
 it can endure no longer than the resources upon which it depends. 
 
 Living as we do to-day in the midst of conveniences which give us 
 apparent independence of nature, it is almost inevitable that we should 
 lose sight of this truth. It is difficult for us to realize that we, standing 
 at the height of western civilization, are in fact vastly more dependent 
 upon tributary nature than is the savage of the South Seas. Suppose 
 the coal supply should give out in the middle of winter ? Suppose a 
 huge conflagration should sweep our forests from the hillsides? Sup- 
 pose sudden floods should lay waste our fertile farm lands, scoring them 
 with gullies or heaping them with sand ? Would not any single one of 
 these calamities bring upon us incalculable losses and suffering? 
 
 And yet these suppositions are not imaginary. We need to look only 
 a very little way ahead, as things are going now, in order to see them 
 realized, in effect. True, the failure of our resources will not come 
 suddenly, and such of our resources as can be renewed need never fail 
 if we use them wisely. But the exhaustible resources, chief among 
 which are the mines, are coming to an end as certainly as if the end 
 were to-day, while those resources whose exhaustion is due not to 
 necessity, but to folly, have no future unless we insure it by our own 
 provision. 
 
 It is clear, therefore, that the question how we shall make the best 
 use of our natural resources, renewable and not renewable, is a pressing 
 question of the hour. Where renewal is impossible, there is need of the 
 strictest economy ; and where renewal can be secured by prudence and 
 foresight, the very existence of the nation demands that prudence and 
 foresight be exercised. 
 
 This is the significance of the Conference of Governors on the Con- 
 servation of Natural Eesources held at the White House, May 13-15, 
 1908, which took up for the first time the problem of conservation in 
 all its details. 
 
 Tbeadv^eljj Cleveland. Jr. 
 
 A NEW PATRIOTIC IMPULSE. 
 
 The World's Work Magazine summed up the Governor's Conference in its 
 editorial correspondence as follows. 
 
 It was the most notable company of men that has come together in 
 our country in recent times. The official head of the nation, the 
 Cabinet, the Supreme Court, certain members of Congress, the heads 
 of the states, and, besides these, many of the most distinguished scientific 
 men that we have and men of a sound grasp of public subjects who 
 
— 84 — 
 
 came as "advisers" to the Governors — two or three of the most note- 
 worthy citizens of every state — among them the presidents of many of 
 our foremost universities and schools of science; and, besides these, 
 representatives of all the most important national organizations of 
 scientific and commercial bodies. 
 
 About the general proposition that this extraordinary meeting was 
 called to emphasize there was no difference of opinion. And the wealth 
 of facts that were presented put the subject in every mind in a new 
 way, and aroused every man to an argent purpose. When one subject 
 was put into every mind as the foremost subject of public action that 
 this generation can have, and was so presented and emphasized as to win 
 universal assent and to arouse a patriotic purpose, then all the machin- 
 ery of publicity, of exhortation, and of public action that a democracy 
 can have was put in action at one stroke. 
 
 The scientific papers presented to the Conference, giving exact data 
 about agriculture, streams, forests, coal, and all similar subjects, were 
 the most practical and helpful literature of waste and of methods of 
 conservation ever put together. They will become a classic description 
 of our great resources as they now are. 
 
 The brief speeches by many of the Governors were in the nature of 
 an ' ' experience meeting. ' ' They told of the work that the state govern- 
 ments are doing to save and to reclaim. And the resolutions adopted 
 called on the government, local and national, and on the people to 
 preserve our national wealth. 
 
 Every man came away from the most noteworthy gathering that he 
 ever attended, with a new love of his country, a new attitude toward it, 
 a new conscience about the land, the trees, and the streams ; and we 
 entered then on a new era in our national thought and in our attitude 
 toward our land. 
 
 ANDREW CARNEGIE. 
 
 The ironmaster of Pittsburg, who has scattered libraries over this continent 
 like the sands of the sea, delivered a striking address from which only a few 
 extracts can be given. 
 
 In view of the sobering facts presented, the thoughtful man is forced 
 to realize, first, that our production and consumption of minerals are 
 increasing much more rapidly than our population; and, second, that 
 our methods are so faulty and extravagant that the average waste is 
 very great, and in coal almost as great as the amount consumed. The 
 serious loss of life in the mines is a feature that can no longer be 
 overlooked. Nor can we fail to realize that the most useful minerals 
 will shortly become scarce, and may soon reach prohibitive cost unless 
 steps to lessen waste are taken in the interest of the future. 
 
— 85 — 
 
 I have for many years been impressed with the steady depletion of 
 our iron ore supply. It is staggering to learn that our once supposed 
 ample supply of rich ores can hardly outlast the generation now appear- 
 ing, leaving only the leaner ores for the later years of the century. It 
 is my judgment, as a practical man accustomed to dealing with those 
 material factors on which our national prosperity is based, that it is 
 time to take thought for the morrow. 
 
 We are nationally in the position of a large family receiving a rich 
 patrimony from thrifty parents deceased intestate; the President may 
 be likened to the eldest son, and the Governors to younger brothers, 
 jointly responsible for the minors ; the experts assembled may be likened 
 to the family solicitors. Now, the first duty of such a family is to take 
 stock of its patrimony; the next to manage the assets in such manner 
 that none shall be wasted, that all be put to the greatest good of the 
 living and their descendants. Now, we have just begun to take stock 
 of our national patrimony ; and it is with the deepest sense of responsi- 
 bility imposed upon me by the invitation to this meeting, to the nation, 
 and to coming generations of all time, that I speak as one of the junior 
 solicitors. In my opinion, we should watch closely all the assets and 
 begin both to save and to use them more wisely. 
 
 Let us begin with iron : We must in all possible ways lessen the * 
 demands upon it, for it is with iron ore we are least adequately pro- 
 vided. One of the chief uses of this metal is connected with transporta- 
 tion, mainly by rail. Moving 1,000 tons of heavy freight by rail 
 requires an 80-ton locomotive and twenty-five 20-ton steel cars (each 
 of 40-ton capacity), or 580 tons of iron and steel, with an average of, 
 say, ten miles of double track (with 90-pound rails), or 317 tons 
 additional ; so that, including switches, frogs, fish-plates, spikes, and 
 other incidentals, the carrier requires the use of an equal weight of 
 metal. The same freight may be moved by water by means of 100 to 
 250 tons of metal, so that the substitution of water-carriage for rail- 
 carriage would reduce the consumption of iron by three fourths to 
 seven eighths in this department. At the same time the consumption 
 of coal for motive power would be reduced 50 to 75 per cent, with a 
 corresponding reduction in the coal required for smelting. No single 
 step open to us to-day would do more to check the drain on iron and 
 coal than the substitution of water-carriage for rail-carriage wherever 
 practicable, and the careful adjustment of the one to the other through- 
 out the country. 
 
NATURAL GAS. 
 
 Dr. White, the State Geologist of West Virginia, presented in vivid fashion a 
 picture of the waste of our purest form of fuel. This is of interest to us in Cali- 
 fornia, because we, too, have great fields of petroleum and natural gas being used 
 in similar ways. 
 
 A great geologist once said, ' ' The nations that have coal and iron will 
 rule the world." Bountiful nature has dowered the American people 
 with a heritage of both coal and iron richer by far than that of any 
 other political division of the earth. 
 
 It was formerly supposed that China would prove the great store- 
 house from which the other nations could draw their supplies of carbon 
 when their own had become exhausted, but the recent studies of a 
 brilliant American geologist in that far-off land, rendered possible by 
 the generosity of the world's greatest philanthropist, tell a different 
 story. The fuel resources of China, great as they undoubtedly are, 
 have been largely overestimated, and Mr. Willis reports that they will 
 practically all be required by China herself, and that the other nations 
 can not look to her for this all-important element in modern industrial 
 life. 
 
 A simple glance at a geological map of the United States, will convince 
 any one that nature has been most lavish to us in fuel resources, for we 
 find a series of great coal deposits extending in well scattered fields 
 almost from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Lakes to the Gulf, 
 while even over much of New England and the coastal plains, vast 
 areas of peat, the primal stage of coal, have been distributed. But coal 
 of every variety from peat to anthracite is not all of nature's fuel gifts 
 to fortunate America. Great deposits of .both petroleum and natural 
 gas occur in nearly every state where coal exists, and in some that have 
 no coal. What greater dowry of fuels could we ask when w£ find them 
 stored for us Avithin the bosom of our mother earth in all three of the 
 great types — coal, petroleum, and natural gas — only aAvaiting the tap of 
 the pick and drill to bring them forth in prodigal abundance? 
 
 What account can we as a nation give of our stewardship of such 
 vast fuel treasures? Have we carefully conserved them, using only 
 what was necessary in our domestic and industrial life, and transmitting 
 the remainder, like prudent husbandmen, unimpaired to succeeding 
 generations] Or have we greatly depleted this priceless heritage of 
 power and comfort, and source of world-wide influence, by criminal 
 waste and wanton destruction? The answer should bring a blush of 
 shame to every patriotic American, for not content with destro;^ing our 
 magnificent forests, the only fuel and supply of carbon known to our 
 forefathers. Ave are with ruthless hands and regardless of the future 
 applying both torch and dynamite to the vastly greater resources of 
 
— 87 — 
 
 this precious carbon which provident nature has stored for our use in 
 the buried forests of the distant past. The wildest anarchists deter- 
 mined to destroy and overturn the foundations of government could not 
 act in a more irrational and thoughtless manner than have our people 
 in permitting such fearful destruction of the very sources of our power 
 and greatness. Let me enumerate some of the details of this awful 
 waste of our fuel resources that has been going on with ever increasing 
 speed for the last forty years. 
 
 First, let us consider how we have wasted natural gas, the purest 
 form of fuel, ideal in every respect, self -transporting, only awaiting 
 the turning of a key to deliver to our homes and factories heat and light 
 and power. Partial nature has apparently denied this great boon to 
 many other lands. It is practically unknown in France, Germany, and 
 Great Britain, our chief competitors in the world of industry. Even 
 wood and coal must first be converted into gas before they will burn, 
 but here is a fuel of which nature has given us a practical monopoly, 
 lavish in abundance, already transmuted into the gaseous stage and 
 stored under vast pressure to be released wherever wanted at our 
 bidding. The record of waste of this our best and purest fuel is a 
 national disgrace. 
 
 At this very minute this unrivaled fuel is passing into the air within 
 our domain from uncontrolled gas wells, from oil wells, from giant 
 flambeaus, from leaking pipe lines and the many other methods of waste 
 at the rate of not less than one billion cubic feet daily and probably 
 much more. 
 
 Very few appear to realize either the great importance of this hydro- 
 carbon fuel resource of our country, or its vast original quantity. Some 
 of the individual wells, if we may credit the measurements, have pro- 
 duced this fuel at the rate of 70,000.000 cubic feet daily, the equivalent 
 in heating value of 70,000 bushels of coal, or nearly 12,000 barrels of 
 oil. In my humble opinion the original amount of this volatile fuel 
 in the United States, permeating, as it does, every undisturbed geologic 
 formation from the oldest to the most recent, rivaled or even exceeded 
 in heating value, all of our wondrous stores of coal. 
 
 Suppose that it were possible for some Nero, inspired by a mania of 
 incendiarism, to apply a consuming torch to every bed of coal that crops 
 to the surface from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and that the entire coal 
 supply of the Union was threatened with destruction within a very 
 few years, what do you think would happen ? Would our State legisla- 
 tures sit undisturbed panoplied by such a carnival of fire ? Would the 
 Governors of thirty states remain silent while the demon of flame was 
 ravaging the coal resources of the republic ? Certainly not ; there would 
 be a united effort by the Governors and legislatures of all the states in 
 the Union to stay the progress of such a direful conflagration ; even the 
 
— 88 — 
 
 sacred constitutional barriers wisely erected between state and federal 
 authority would melt away in the presence of such an awful calamity, 
 and the mighty arm of the nation would be invoked to help end the 
 common peril to every interest. And yet this imaginary case is an 
 actual one with the best and purest fuel of the country, equal probably 
 in quantity and value for heat, light, and power to all of our coal 
 resources. This blazing zone of destruction extends in a broad band 
 from the Lakes to the Gulf, and westward to the Pacific, embracing in 
 its flaming pathway the most precious fuel possessions of a continent. 
 No one can even approximate the extent of this waste. From personal 
 knowledge of conditions which exits in every oil and gas field, I am 
 sure the quantity will amount to not less than one billion cubic feet 
 daily, and it may be much more. The heating value of a billion cubic 
 feet of natural gas is roughly equivalent to that of one million bushels 
 of coal. What an appalling record to transmit to posterity! 
 
 From one well in eastern Kentucky there poured a stream of gas for 
 a period of twenty years without any attempt to shut it in or utilize it, 
 the output of which, it has been figured, was worth at current prices 
 more than three million dollars. Practically. the same conditions charac- 
 terized the first twenty-five years of Pennsylvania's oil and gas history, 
 and the quantity of wasted gas from thousands of oil and gas wells in 
 western Pennsylvania is beyond computation. In my own state of 
 West Virginia, only eight years ago, not less than 500,000.000 cubic 
 feet of this precious gas was daily escaping into the air from two 
 counties alone, practically all of which was easily preventable, by a 
 moderate expenditure for additional casing. When it is remembered 
 that one thousand cubic feet of natural gas weighs 48 pounds, and that 
 6,000 cubic feet of it would yield a 42-gallon barrel of oil when con- 
 densed, so that a well flowing 6,000,000 feet of gas is pouring into the 
 air daily the equivalent of 1,000 barrels of oil, what would our 
 petroleum kings think, if they could see this river of oil (for the 
 equivalent of a billion feet of gas is more than 160,000 barrels of 
 petroleum, and of practically the same chemical composition as benzine 
 or gasolene) rushing unhindered to the sea? Would they not spend 
 millions to check such a frightful waste of this golden fluid? And 
 would they not be the first to appeal to the national government for aid 
 in, ending such great destruction of property? And yet because natural 
 gas is invisible, and its waste is not so apparent to the eye as a stream 
 of oil, or a burning coal mine, the agents of these oil magnates have not 
 only permitted this destruction of the nation's fuel resources to con- 
 tinue, but they have prevented by every means in their power the enact- 
 ment of any legislation to stop this frightful loss of the best and purest 
 fuel that nature has sjiven to man. 
 
— 89 — 
 
 There can be no doubt that for every barrel of oil taken from the 
 earth there have been wasted more than ten times its equivalent in 
 either heating power, or weight even, of this the best of all the fuels, 
 and also that much more than half of this frightful waste could have 
 been avoided by proper care in oil production and slight additional 
 expenditures. 
 
 In justice to the great oil-producing corporations, it must be acknowl- 
 edged that they have not permitted much waste of petroleum except 
 what has been sprayed into the air by their awful waste of gas. and also 
 that their handling of petroleum has been from the beginning a model 
 of business economy and management. The great mistake of the oil 
 producing interests has been in not properly apprehending the enor- 
 mous fuel value of the natural gas they were destroying, and in not 
 demanding legislation for its protection instead of successfully 
 throttling and preventing it in every state of the Union except one — 
 Indiana. When the people of that great state awoke to the fact that 
 their richest mineral possession was being rapidly wasted, they rose to 
 the occasion, and although it was largely a case of "locking the stable 
 door after the horse had been stolen," they effectually prevented any 
 further useless waste of natural gas. This Indiana statute which has 
 been declared constitutional by our highest courts, says in effect to the 
 oil producers: "You can not take the oil from the ground where nature 
 has safely stored it, until you provide a method of utilizing the accom- 
 panying gas, or volatile oil as well," and it also says to both the pro- 
 ducer and consumer of natural gas, that it is against "public policy to 
 waste this valuable fuel, and that it will not be permitted to either 
 party." This Indiana statute for the conservation of petroleum and 
 natural gas should be enacted into law in every state where this precious 
 fuel exists ; and why has it not been done ? 
 
 JAMES J. HILL. 
 
 The railroad magnate of the Great Northern is recognized not only as a cap- 
 tain of industry, but as a high authority on the lands and resources of the United 
 States. His thoughts are well worth weighing. 
 
 "Of all the sinful wasters of man's inheritance on earth." said the 
 late Professor Shaler, "and all are in this regard sinners, the very 
 worst are the people of America. ' ' This is not a popular phrase, but a 
 scientific judgment. It is borne out by facts. In the movement of 
 modern times, which has made the world commercially a small place, 
 and has produced a solidarity of the races such as never before existed, 
 we have come to the point where we must to a certain extent regard the 
 natural resources of this planet as a common asset, compare them with 
 demands now made and likely to be made upon them, and study their 
 
— 90 — 
 
 judicious use. Commerce, wherever untrammeled, is wiping out boun- 
 daries and substituting the world relation of demand and supply for 
 smaller systems of local economy. The changes of a single generation 
 have brought the nations of the earth closer together than were the 
 states of this Union at the close of the Civil War. If we fail to consider 
 what we possess of wealth available for the uses of mankind, and to 
 what extent we are wasting a national patrimony that can never be 
 restored, we might be likened to the directors of a company who never 
 examine a balance sheet. 
 
 The sum of resources is simple and fixed. From the sea, the mine, 
 the forest and the soil must be gathered everything that can sustain the 
 life of man. Upon the wealth that these supply must be conditioned 
 forever, as far as we can see, not only his progress, but his continued 
 existence on earth. How stands the inventory of property for our own 
 people ? The resources of the sea furnish less than five per cent of the 
 food supply, and that is all. The forests of this country, the product of 
 centuries of growth, are fast disappearing. The best estimates reckon 
 our standing merchantable timber at less than 2,000,000,000,000 feet. 
 Our annual cut is about 40,000,000,000,000 feet. The lumber cut rose 
 from 18,000.000,000 feet in 1880 to 34.000,000,000 feet in 1905 ; that is, 
 it nearly doubled in twenty-five years. We are now using annually 500 
 feet board measure of timber per capita, as against an average of 60 for 
 all Europe. The New England supply is gone. The Northwest fur- 
 nishes small growths that would have been rejected by the lumbermen 
 of thirty years ago. The South has reached its maximum production and 
 begins to decline. On the Pacific coast only is there now any consider- 
 able body of merchantable standing timber. We are consuming yearly 
 three or four times as much timber as forest growth restores. Our 
 supply of some varieties will be practically exhausted in ten or twelve 
 years : in the case of others, without reforesting, the pi'esent century 
 will see the end. When will Ave take up in a practical and intelligent 
 way of reforestation of our forest > * * * 
 
 The exhaustion of our coal supply is not in the indefinite future. 
 The startling feature of our coal production is not so much the magni- 
 tude of the annual output as its rate of growth. For the decade ending 
 in 1905 the total product was 2,832,402,746 tons, which is almost exactly 
 one half the total product previously mined in this countrj^ For the 
 year 1906 the output was 414,000,000 tons, an increase of 46 per cent on 
 the average annual yield of the ten years preceding. In 1907 our pro- 
 duction reached 470,000,000 tons. Fifty years ago the annual per 
 capita production was a little more than one quarter of a ton. It is 
 now about five tons. It is but eight years since we took the place of 
 Great Britain as the leading coal-producing nation of the world, and 
 already our product exceeds hers by over 43 per cent, and is 37 per cent 
 
— 91 — 
 
 of the known production of the world. Estimates of coal deposits still 
 remaining must necessarily be somewhat vague, but they are approxi- 
 mately near the mark. The best authorities do not rate them at much 
 over 2,000,000,000,000 tons. If coal production continues to increase 
 as it has in the last ninety years, the available supply will be greatly 
 reduced by the close of the century. Before that time arrives, however, 
 resort to lower grades and sinking of mines to greater depths will 
 become necessary, making the product inferior in quality and higher in 
 price. Already Great Britain's industries have felt the check from a 
 similar cause, as shown in her higher cost of production. Our turn will 
 begin probably within a generation or two from this time. Yet we still 
 think nothing of consuming this priceless resource with the greatest 
 possible speed. Our methods of mining are often wasteful; and we 
 not only prohibit our industries from having recourse to the coal sup- 
 plies of other countries, but actually pride ourselves upon becoming 
 exporters of a prime necessity of life and an essential of civilization. 
 
 The iron industry tells a similar story. The total of iron ore mined 
 in the United States doubles about once in seven years. It was less 
 than 12,000.000 tons in 1893, over 24,000,000 tons in 1899, 47,740,000 
 tons in 1906. and over 52,000,000 tons in 1907. The rising place of iron 
 in the world's life is the most impressive phenomenon of the last cen- 
 tury. In 1850 the pig iron production of the United States amounted 
 to 563,757 tons, or about 50 pounds per capita. Our production now is 
 over 600 pounds per capita. We do not work a mine, build a house, 
 weave a fabric, prepare a meal or cultivate an acre of ground under 
 modern methods without the aid of iron. We turn out over 25,000,000 
 tons of pig iron every year, and the production for the first half of 
 1907 was at the rate of 27,000,000 tons. This is two and one half times 
 the product of Great Britain. It is nearly half the product of the whole 
 world. And the supply of this most precious of all the metals is so far 
 from inexhaustible that it seems as if iron and coal might be united in 
 their disappearance from common life. 
 
 We now turn to the only remaining resource of man upon this earth, 
 which is the soil itself. How are we caring for that, and what possibili- 
 ties does it hoM out to the people of future support? We are only 
 beginning to feel the pressure upon the land. The whole interior of 
 this continent, aggregating more than 500,000,000 acres, has been occu- 
 pied by settlers within the last fifty years. What is there left for the 
 next fifty years 1 Excluding arid and irrigable areas, the latter limited 
 by nature, and barely enough of which could be made habitable in each 
 year to furnish a farm for each immigrant family, the case stands as 
 follows: In 1906 the total unappropriated public lands in the United 
 States consisted of 792,000,000 acres. Of this area the divisions of 
 Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New 
 
— 92 ~ 
 
 Mexico, and Wyoming contained 195,700,000 acres of unsurveyed land. 
 Little of Alaska is fitted for general agriculture, while practically all 
 of the rest is semi-arid, available only for grazing or irrigation. We 
 have (subtracting these totals) 50,000,000 acres of surveyed and 
 36,500,000 acres of unsurveyed land as our actual remaining stock. 
 And 21,000,000 acres were disposed of in 1907. How long^'will the 
 remainder last? No longer can we say that "Uncle Sam has enough 
 to give us all a farm. ' ' 
 
 Equally threatening is the change in quality. There are two ways 
 in which the productive power of the earth is lessened ; first by erosion 
 and the sweeping away of the fertile surface into streams and thence to 
 the sea, and, second, by exhaustion through wrong methods of cultiva- 
 tion. The former process has gone far. Thousands of acres in the 
 East and South have been made unfit for tillage. North Carolina was, 
 a century ago, one of the great agricultural states of the country, and 
 one of the wealthiest. To-day as you ride through the South you see 
 everywhere land gullied by torrential rains, red and j^ellow clay banks 
 exposed where once were fertile fields ; and agriculture reduced because 
 its main support has been washed away. ]\Iillions of acres, in places to 
 the extent of one tenth of the entire arable area, have been so injured 
 that no industry and no care can restore them. 
 
 Far more ruinous, because universal and continuing in its effects, is 
 the process of soil exhaustion. It is creeping over the land from East 
 to West. The abandoned farms that are now the playthings of the city's 
 rich or the game preserves of patrons of sport, bear witness to the 
 melancholy change. New Hampshire, Vermont, northern New York, 
 show long lists of them. In western Massachusetts, which once sup- 
 ported a flourishing agriculture, farm properties are now for sale for 
 half the cost of the improvements. Professor Carver, of Harvt^rd, has 
 declared, after a personal examination of the country, that ''agriculture 
 as an independent industry, able in itself to support a community, does 
 not exist in the hilly parts of New England. ' ' 
 
 The same process of deterioration is affecting the farm lands of 
 western New York, Ohio, and Indiana. Where prices of farms should 
 rise by increase of population, in many places they are falling. Between 
 1880 and 1900 the land values of Ohio shrank $60,000,000. Official 
 investigation of two counties in central New York disclosed a condition 
 of agricultural decay. In one land was for sale for about the cost of 
 improvements, and 150 vacant houses were counted in a limited area. 
 In the other the population in 1905 was nearly 4,000 lass than in 1855. 
 Practically identical soil conditions exist in Maryland and Virginia, 
 where lands sell at from $10 to $30 an acre. In a hearing before an 
 industrial commission, the chief of the Bureau of Soils of the Depart- 
 ment of Agriculture said: "One of the most important causes of 
 
— 93 — 
 
 deterioration, and I think I should put this first of all, is the method 
 and system of agriculture that prevails throughout these states. 
 Unquestionably the soil has been abused." The richest region of the 
 West is no more exempt than New England or the South. The soil of 
 the West is being reduced in agricultural potency by exactly the same 
 processes which have driven the farmer of the East, with all his advan- 
 tage of nearness to markets, from the field. 
 
 Within the last forty years a great part of the richest land in the 
 country has been brought under cultivation. We should, therefore, in 
 the same time, have raised proportionately the yield of our principal 
 crops per acre ; because the yield of old lands, if properly treated, tends 
 to increase rather than diminish. The year 1906 was one of large crops, 
 and can scarcely be taken as a standard. We produced, for example, 
 more corn that year than had ever been grown in the United States in 
 a single year before. But the average yield per acre was less than it 
 was in 1872. We are barely keeping the acre product stationary. The 
 average wheat crop of the country now ranges from twelve and one half, 
 in ordinary 3^ears, to fifteen bushels per acre in the best seasons. And 
 so it is on down the line. 
 
 Not only the economic but the political future is involved. No people 
 ever felt the want of work or the pinch of poverty for a long time with- 
 out reaching out violent hands against their political institutions, 
 believing that they might find in a change some relief from their dis- 
 tress. Although there have been moments of such restlessness in our 
 country, the trial has never been so severe or so prolonged as to put us 
 to the test. It is interesting that one of the ablest men in England 
 during the last century, a historian of high merit, a statesman who saw 
 active service and a profound student of men and things, put on record 
 his prophecy of such a future ordeal. Writing to an American corre- 
 spondent fifty years ago, Lord Macaulay used these words: "As long as 
 you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, your labor- 
 ing population will be found more at ease than the laboring population 
 of the Old World; but the time will come when wages will be as low 
 and will fluctuate as much with you as they do with us. Then your 
 institutions will be brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the 
 laborer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with 
 eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that 
 one man should have a million and another can not get a full meal. 
 * * * The day will come when the multitudes of people, none of 
 whom has had more than half a breakfast or expects to have more than 
 half a dinner, will choose a legislature. Is it possible to doubt what 
 sort of legislature will be chosen? * * * There will be, I fear, 
 spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress ; the distress will 
 produce a fresh spoliation. * * * Either civilization or liberty will 
 
— 94 — 
 
 perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of govern- 
 ment with a strong hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered 
 and laid waste by barbarians in the tw^entieth century as the Roman 
 Empire in the fifth." We need not accept this gloomy picture too 
 literally, but w-e have been already sufficiently warned to prevent us 
 from dismissing the subject as unworthy of attention. Every nation 
 finds its hour of peril when there is no longer free access to the land* 
 or when the land will no longer support the people. * * * Far may 
 this day be from us. But since the unnecessary destruction of our land 
 will bring new conditions of danger, its conservation, its improvement 
 to the highest point of productivity promised by scientific intelligence 
 and practical experiment, appears to be a first command of any political 
 economy worthy of the name. 
 
 If this patriotic gospel is to make headway, it must be by just such 
 organized missionary work as is to-day begun. It can not go on and 
 conquer if imposed from wdthout. It must come to represent the fixed 
 idea of the people's mind, their determination and their hope. It can 
 not be .incorporated in our practical life by the dictum of any individual 
 or any officer of nation or state in his official capacity. It needs the 
 cooperation of all the influences, the help of every voice, the commenda- 
 tion of nation and state that has been the strength and inspiration of 
 every worthy w^ork on American soil for 120 years. We return, for our 
 gathering in council and for our plan of action for the future, to the 
 model given us by the fathers. State and nation are represented here, 
 without jealousy or any ambition of superiority on either side, to apply 
 to the consideration of our future such cooperation as that o\it of Avhich 
 this nation w^as born, and by which it has won to worthy manhood. 
 Reviving the spirit of the days that created our Constitution, the days 
 that carried us through civil conflict, the spirit by which all our endur- 
 ing work in the w-orld has been wrought, taking thought as Washington 
 and Lincoln took thought, only for the highest good of all the people, we 
 may, as a result of the deliberations held and the conclusions reached 
 here to-day, give new meaning to our future; new lustre to the ideal 
 of a republic of living federated states ; shape anew the fortunes of this 
 country, and enlarge the borders of hope for all mankind. 
 
95 
 
 THE SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE. 
 
 Perhaps no one has had a better opportunity to know about the so'\] of this 
 nation than James Wilson, the Secretary of Agriculture. He made the following 
 remarks. 
 
 ' ' The paper read by Mr. Hill this morning made a ver^' deep impres- 
 sion upon me. The greatest asset we have in the United States is our 
 soil ; we are destroying that as rapidly as we can, and the oldest settled 
 part of the United States has made the most progress in the destruction 
 of our soil, of which we have a great variety. Down on the Gulf 
 coast the land has been peopled longer than the upper part of the 
 Mississippi Valley. The heavy rainfalls, and the perpetual cultivation 
 and growing of crops have helped erosion, and the soil has been 
 destroyed in that way. It is going off very, very rapidly. The»cure 
 is a system of agriculture that will keep the soil filled with plant food, 
 organic matter, humus. That is the cure ; that is the way to keep up the 
 soil. Somebody once asked an English gardener how he got such a fine 
 lawn. He had a beautiful grass lawn which attracted attention. He 
 said, 'We weeded, and we weeded: we manured and we manured, for 
 eight hundred years;' and that is the way they got it." 
 
 IN WISCONSIN. 
 
 The Governor of Wisconsin graphically described the recent history of his 
 own state. 
 
 ' ' Great lumber companies, ' ' said Governor Davidson, ' ' inspired only 
 by an enthusiasm and a greed which knew no bounds, attacked these 
 forests, engaging in a mad race each to strip its territory, to market its 
 lumber first, and then to move forward and continue the destruction. 
 No tree was regarded as too small to escape cutting. Trunks six inches 
 in diameter were cut for lumber. Millions of young trees and saplings, 
 which were too small to have any commercial value, were crushed by 
 falling timber, or were cut to make room for logging roads. Those that 
 escaped the axe of the loggers fell ^actims to forest fires, the destruction 
 by which can only be counted by the millions of dollars — a further 
 melancholy evidence of the carelessness with which our forest tracts 
 were guarded. 
 
 '' To-day we are beginning to feel the penalty for this indifference. 
 Our proud position as the greatest timber state of the Union has passed 
 to others. Thousands of acres of land of no value for agriculture have 
 been rendered bare and practically worthless ; our swamps are drying 
 up. and as a consequence many of our streams have shrunk to but a 
 small proportion of their former size. The destruction of our forests 
 
— 96 — 
 
 has taken from us that great regulator of the streams, for with no 
 forests to protect the head water of rivers and to detain the water 
 upon the soil, we have frequent freshets and floods, and are confronted 
 with the problem of dealing with rapidly rising and falling stream 
 volume — a condition which has already rendered many of our one-time 
 valuable water powers practically worthless." 
 
 A DISSENTING VIEW. 
 
 President James of the University of Illinois dissented from the ideas of the 
 other speakers. 
 
 It was his optimistic opinion, that no such waste as had been alluded 
 to by previous speakers had existed in this country; or, if it did exist, 
 it was not really waste, but the simple methods that, instinctively 
 adopted by the early settlers of the country, had proven themselves in 
 the main correct. He said that the fact that farms of the East have 
 passed out of cultivation is not necessarily an indication that those 
 farms have lost their productive power, but, rather, that they have 
 been abandoned because of the opening up of broader fields of useful- 
 ness in the regions beyond the IMississippi and the Missouri, and he said 
 he believed that, after all is said and done, the greatest natural resources 
 the country possesses is not its forests, its rivers, its mines, or its soil, 
 but in the brains of its people. 
 
97 
 
 DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES. 
 
 Before adjourning, the Governors signed the following Declaration as 
 embodying the results of the Convention : 
 
 DECLARATION. 
 
 We, the Governors of the States and Territories of the United States of 
 America, in conference assembled, do hereby declare the conviction that the 
 great prosperity of our country rests upon the abundant resources of the land 
 chosen by our forefathers for their homes, and where they laid the foundation of 
 this great nation. 
 
 We look upon these resources as a heritage to be made use of in establishing 
 and promoting the comfort, prosperity, and happiness of the American people, 
 but not to be wasted, deteriorated, or needlessly destroyed. 
 
 We agree that our country's future is involved in this; that the great natural 
 resources supply the material basis upon which our civilization must continue 
 to depend, and upon which the perpetuity of the nation itself rests. 
 
 We agree, in the light of the facts brought to our knowledge and from infor- 
 nnation received from sources which we can not doubt, that this material basis 
 is threatened with exhaustion. Even as each succeeding generation from the 
 birth of the nation has performed its part in promoting the progress and 
 development of the Republic, so do we in this generation recognize it as a high 
 duty to perform our part; and this duty in large degree lies in the adoption 
 of measures for the conservation of the natural wealth of the country. 
 
 We declare our firm conviction that this conservation of our natural resources 
 is a subject of transcendent importance, which should engage unremittingly 
 the attention of the nation, the States, end the people in earnest co-operation. 
 These natureil resources include the land on which we live and which yields 
 our food; the living waters which fertilize the soil, supply power, and form 
 great avenues of commerce; the forests which yield the materials for our homes, 
 prevent erosion of the soil, and conserve the navigation and other uses of the 
 streams; and the minerals which form the basis of our industrial life, and supply 
 us with heat, light, and power. 
 
 We agree that the land should be so used that erosion and soil wash shall 
 cease; and that there should be reclamation of arid and semi-arid regions by 
 nneans of irrigation, and of swamp and overflowed regions by means of drainage; 
 that the waters should be so conserved and used as to promote navigation, to 
 enable the arid regions to be reclaimed by irrigation, and to develop power in 
 the interests of the people; that the forests which regulate our rivers, support 
 our industries, and promote the fertility and productiveness of the soil should 
 be preserved and perpetuated; that the minerals found so abundantly beneath 
 the surface should be so used as to prolong their utility; that the beauty, health- 
 fulness, and habitability of our country should be preserved and increased; 
 that sources of national wealth exist for the benefit of the people, and that 
 monopoly thereof should not be tolerated. 
 
 We commend the wise forethought of the President in sounding the note of 
 warning as to the waste and exhaustion of the natural resources of the country, 
 and signify our high appreciation of his action in calling this conference to con- 
 sider the same and to seek remedies therefor through co-operation of the Nation 
 and States. 
 
 We agree that this co-operation should find expression in suitable action by 
 the Congress within the limits of and coextensive with the national jurisdiction 
 of the subject, and, complimentary thereto, by the Legislatures of the several 
 states within the limits of and coextensive with their jurisdiction. 
 
 7— NR 
 
. .„ ^.^., , ;^ • • • -_ 98 — 
 
 We declare 'the* cbnVictrori* that in. iVie use of the national resources our inde- 
 ipendent States are interdependent and bound together by ties of mutual benefits, 
 responsibilities, and duties. 
 
 We agree in the wisdom of future conferences between the President, Mem- 
 bers of Congress, and the Governors of States on the conservation of our natural 
 resources with a view of continued co-operation and action on the lines sug- 
 gested; and to this end we advise that from time to time, as in his judgment 
 unay seem wise, the President call the Governors of States and Members of Con- 
 tgress and others into conference. 
 
 We agree that further action is advisable to ascertain the present condition 
 of our natural resources and to promote the conservation of the same; and to 
 that end we recommend the appointment by each State of a commission on the 
 conservation of natural resources, to co-operate with each other and with any 
 similar commission of the Federal Government. 
 
 We urge the continuation and extension of forest policies adapted to secure 
 the husbanding and renewal of our diminishing timber supply, the prevention of 
 soil erosion, the protection of head waters, and the maintenance of the purity 
 and navigability of our streams. We recognize that the private ownership of 
 forest lands entails responsiblities in the interests of the people, and we favor 
 the enactment of laws looking to the protection and replacement of privately 
 owned forests. 
 
 We recognize in our waters a most valuable asset of the people of the United 
 States, and we recommend the enactment of laws looking to the conservation 
 of water resources for irrigation, water supply, power, and navigation, to the 
 end that navigable and source streams may be brought under complete control 
 and fully utilized for every purpose. We especially urge on the Federal Congress 
 the immediate adoption of a wise, active, and thorough waterway policy, pro- 
 viding for the prompt improvement of our streams and the conservation of their 
 watersheds required for the uses of commerce and the protection of the interests 
 of our people. 
 
 We recommend the enactment of laws looking to the prevention of waste In 
 the mining and extraction of coal, oil, gas, and other minerals with a view to 
 their wise conservation for the use of the people, and to the protection of human 
 life in the mines. 
 
 Let us conserve the foundations of our prosperity. 
 
FINAL WORD. 
 
 This handbook should be duly stamped, 
 catalogued and placed in the school library for 
 future reference. It will be needed for essays 
 and compositions, debates and recitations, read- 
 ings and memory gems. After this edition is 
 exhausted it will not be possible to get dupli- 
 cates. 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
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 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
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