CIVILIZATION AND VEGETATION 335 



even the soil was poisoned, a mistake, of course. Since there is scarcely 

 any level land in that district, one may imagine the result of removing 

 the forest cover, destroying the undergrowth and preventing any other 

 vegetation which might cover the naked soil with its branches or leaves 

 and hold it together and in place with its roots. Instead, the leaf-mold 

 accumulated during centuries on the forest floor and the fine soil worked 

 and re- worked by roots, worms and other occupants of the ground, were 

 quickly washed down the slopes into the turbid streams, floods took the 

 place of the spring freshets, and the bare earth battered by the rains 

 constantly gave its fertility to the already rich lowlands far away, or to 

 the still more distant and unneeding sea. 



Conditions are better now. Instead of throwing away as a poisonous 

 waste the sulphur dioxide formed in smelting their ores, the smelters 

 are now collecting as large a proportion of this gas as possible for the 

 manufacture of sulphuric acid. This they sell to the manufacturers of 

 phosphate fertilizer. Instruction is leading to improved methods of 

 farming, to the use of the phosphates made from converted smelter 

 waste, the farms are beginning to yield crops which repay tillage, and 

 the woodlands are improving. To complete this romance of industry 

 reformed under federal compulsion, it need only be said that the manu- 

 facture of sulphuric acid is so profitable that the smelters would be run 

 for that purpose now if for no other, and that their copper costs them 

 nothing ! 



In this conflict of industry with agriculture and the native vegeta- 

 tion the outcome has been a happy one; for industry, forced to recog- 

 nize prior and more general rights, has been so modified as to eliminate 

 its injurious effects and to enhance its own profits. This is seldom 

 possible to anything like the same extent. The greater the industrial 

 plant requiring reform, the more intense and extensive the damage it 

 does, and the greater must be the difficulty of making the needed changes 

 in method of operation. And yet even manufacturers are coming to see, 

 by compulsion to be sure in most cases, that their rights are not un- 

 limited, that they must conduct their business in such a manner that 

 agricultural or other legitimate and established interests will not suffer 

 and that the property of the nation be not injured. 



This is the significance of the agreement reported in the newspapers 

 as recently made by the Attorney General of the United States with the 

 owners of the great smelters in Montana. These smeltermen, rather 

 than fight a suit brought in the federal court by the Attorney General, 

 have promised to modify their methods of extracting copper and the 

 other metals from their ores, so that they will no longer injure the 

 property of the nation. One of these smelters handles 10,000 tons of 

 ore per day, when running to its capacity, and last summer I drove 

 twenty-five miles away from it, passing over the continental divide, 



