PRESENT FORESTRY ISSUES 75 



of trees. For a camp to be sanitary, an open field, with dry sandy soil is to be 

 preferred. You will find that any experienced soldier in selecting camp sites 

 will take an open field, if possible, with sandy soil. Why? Because there are 

 no trees there to conserve the moisture and create, therefore, possible rheuma- 

 tism and fever for men who have to sleep on the bare ground. 



Go and look in the forest yourself; you do not have to consult a book or 

 a scientist to learn that brake and ferns and the moss and the lichens that 

 must have moisture do not grow like corn and potatoes in the open fields. You 

 have to go into the woods to find those particular forms of vegetation which 

 must have moisture to preserve their very existence. Do you plant lilies of 

 the valley in the blazing sunlight or poppies in deep shade? Does any laun- 

 dress dry the weekly wash under trees? Will moisture evaporate, as our 

 enemies claim, as swiftly in the shade as in the sunlight? Every flapping 

 clothes line in the United States demonstrates the contrary. It seems ridicu- 

 lous that any American, least of all a responsible American legislator, should 

 for personal purposes solemnly try to deny not merely a scientific fact but the 

 common law of nature. 



The former President of the United States presented in a message to 

 Congress pictures of hills in eastern China, where after the forests had been 

 cut down, not merely did a steady supply of water fail, but the freshets oc- 

 casioned by torrential rains washed away the soil itself, and with the disap- 

 pearance of the soil regions, once the home of a densely packed population, 

 are now not merely barren of vegetation, but barren of the population that 

 they can no longer support. 



You heard the state forester of New Hampshire promise us yesterday that 

 he would show you photographs of some New Hampshire hills where the lack 

 of a forest reservation has permitted the same kind of destructive cutting as 

 in Spain, in China, in Italy, in northern Africa. By these photographs you 

 will see that there is nothing left but bare, stony, gravelly hillsides that never 

 can be reclaimed, because the soil itself is gone. To the figment of the theo- 

 rist's imagination that forests do not control stream flow, we oppose a photo- 

 graphic fact. 



Water is a beneficent servant to man if properly controlled, but if unre- 

 strained by the forests on the hillsides it is more destructive than fire. A 

 prairie fire will at least leave the soil behind, but the water rushing down a 

 steep slope carries with it the very soil itself, leaving only the bed rock, which 

 never can be reclaimed. 



Another problem solved by the existence of forests along the banks of 

 rivers, and especially about their headwaters, is the question of drainage. The 

 great rivers, and notably the two rivers most affected by the White Mountain 

 forests — the Merrimac and the Connecticut, and to a certain extent, the Saco, 

 act not merely as sources of water power and water supply, but also as a great 

 central drain through which the sewage of all the valley is carried out to the 

 sea. In these later years we have seen low water in these rivers, notably in 

 the fall, leaving exposed on the banks the disease germs which dried and 

 blown about, are scattered as dust, menacing the entire district. Let not 

 coming generations say of this one : "You were the ones who are responsible 

 for planting disease for your children and your children's children. By de- 

 stroying your forests you have robbed your children not only of their timber, 

 not only of their water supply and water power, not only of the soil of the 

 mountain sides and thus of the sturdy sons of the mountains, but by con- 

 taminating the river banks you have left us a legacy of disease and contamin- 

 ated the very air we breathe." 



