and may continue to do so until all the original stock of timber is exhausted. But they are doing this at the expense of the nation. While on the one hand the people fail to protect them against fire, on the other hand they extort excessive taxes. Thereby they make it impossible for lumbermen to cut their timber conservatively, with due attention to reforestation, and to carry on proper silviculture. The people alone are the losers. On the treatment of the questions of fire and taxes depends the future of American forest industries. Their solution can be reached by nothing but legislation; legislation depends upon the will of the people in a commonwealth where all political action is ultimately decided by public opinion. In other countries, the judgment of a few enlightened men may sometimes introduce wise reforms, even against the will of those who are to reap the ultimate benefit. But this incidental advantage of monarchy and aristocracy we gave up when we chose the greater benefits of a democratic form of national life. Having made the many their own masters, we must persuade them to do what will be for their own good, and point out to them the way they cannot find by themselves. This necessity of teaching not a few, but the many, makes reforms in our governmental affairs plants of slow growth, and the time which is spent in agitation and instruction is usually much longer with us than with other nations. The forestry problem is but just emerging from this preliminary stage. While it is not the purpose of this book to furnish a history of the movement for forestry reform in this country, our survey of the subject would be incomplete if we did not devote a chapter to the various phases through which the movement has passed. At the same time we ought to consider some of the work which is done by various governmental and educational institutions, and the matter of agitation and instruction. Finally we must show how within quite recent years the movement has begun to have some results, both in legislation and actual silviculture. CHAPTER XI REFORM IN FORESTRY METHODS I would be impossible to fix the year when the agitation for better methods of treating forest resources in the United States began. In the writings of scientific men, as well as of travellers and lovers of scenery and outdoor life, of more than fifty years ago, one occasionally finds expressions of regret that our forests are being wasted. Gradually the number of such expressions increases. Writers begin to call attention to the evil effects deforestation must exercise on climate, waterflow, and fertility of soil. But for a very long time no practical remedies are suggested, nor is the question approached in a systematic and business-like manner. It is a peculiar feature of the history of American forestry that the impetus towards reform began with botanists and other scientific men on the one hand, horticulturists and landscape gardeners on the other. It was far different in Europe, and especially Germany, when about the middle of the eighteenth century the need of a more rational treatment of forests first attracted wide-spread attention. There it was from an economic and financial standpoint that the question was first approached. Many of the rulers of the multitude of small communities into which Germany was divided, and who treated their dominions very much as a man would his private estates, had rather expensive tastes, and found that they must either retrench or increase their revenues. When the ability of their subjects to pay taxes was exhausted, they turned to the large forests, which most of them possessed, in order to replenish their coffers, and their advisers usually had sense enough to see that one could increase the productivity of the forests without destroying them. When fifty years later most of these princelings were mediatized, the larger portion of their forests became the property of the greater states of which their territories were made parts, and formed the nucleus of the magnificent system of state forests Germany enjoys to-day. On the other hand, the abler statesmen of the eighteenth century saw that there was danger of the supply of lumber and fire-wood,-which latter was then of much more importance than now,-falling behind the demand and prices rising excessively. So they thought of ways to increase the productivity of forests and prevent their destruction. Thus both the greed of the bad rulers and the foresight of good ones caused the adoption of rational forestry methods. The fact that in the United States the first impulse towards forestry reform has not come from the owners and exploiters, nor from economists or statesmen, but from people who had a scientific or generally patriotic interest in the subject, has given the movement a very peculiar course. On the one hand, the circumstance was a fortunate one, for it enlisted in favor of reform a body of men, of highly trained intelligence, who had no personal and pecuniary interests at stake and therefore could not fall under the suspicion of having private ends to serve whenever they urged upon the public the adoption of any particular policy. But there were serious drawbacks to this advantage. The public, who heard the subject discussed principally by botanists and writers on allied subjects, soon conceived the notion that forestry is primarily a question concerning scientists only, and not of general importance. This notion is not yet eradicated from the popular mind, any more than its sister error, that forestry is identical with tree planting, and that its practice is therefore promoted by getting people interested in setting out shade trees along roadsides or in the school grounds. Yet the botanists and horticulturists at least knew what they were about, so far as they went. True, they neglected almost entirely the business side of the problem, and devoted themselves exclusively to the question of preserving forests on account of the climatic and physiographical dangers accompanying their removal. within this limited field they were serious and intelligent, and great praise is due to their efforts in promoting a more general understanding of these matters. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the horde of purveyors of light literature who But |