American Forestry 





VOL. XVII FEBRUARY, 1911 No. 2 



PRESENT FORESTRY ISSUES 



By HON. CURTIS GUILD, JR. 



(The President's Address at the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the American Forestry 



Association.) 



y^HE preservation of the trees is a portion of the programme of progres- 

 Lj sive legislation which has at last secured an almost universal grip upon 

 ^^^ the minds of the American people. Two years ago at the Indianapolis 

 convention some of us were daring enough to propose an impartial tariff com- 

 mission for the regulation of the details of tariff schedules. It was supposed 

 that such a result would take years and years of patient effort. We now are 

 actually on the verge of accomplishing the greatest reform in tariff legisla- 

 tion that has been known in the United States in a hundred years, and it is 

 coming true within three years after the first agitation of the matter. 



In similar fashion, another progressive policy, the preservation of the 

 trees, and through the preservation of the trees conservation of water power 

 and water supply, is daily gaining in its grip on the popular mind and the 

 popular imagination, and is going forward with the rest of the progressive 

 programme of legislation. The national government is giving it more and 

 more attention, and we are particularly fortunate that we have at the head 

 of that great bureau here in Washington so capable and competent and tact- 

 ful a person as Mr. Graves, the United States Forester. You heard him 

 relate yesterday how every cloud has its silver lining. Even the terrible 

 forest fires of the West in this last year have not been without their bene- 

 fits in calling the attention of the nation to the needs of tree conserva- 

 tion and in procuring proper patrols and proper guards against forest fires in 

 the very district where forest fires have been such a curse in the past. The 

 efforts of a friendly national administration are being seconded by the steady 

 growth in one state after another of state boards of forestry or forestry 

 commissions or state foresters. An increasing amount of land is being res- 

 cued through those agencies, and not merely are existing trees preserved, but 

 new districts are being reforested. 



Mr. Rane, from my own Commonwealth of Massachusetts, has spoken to 

 you of a beneficent measure, which is bringing hundreds of acres of land 

 under state control. The farmer is allowed to surrender his land, his waste 

 land, to the state government of Massachusetts, which takes that land, plants 

 it with the kind of trees that the soil is best fitted to raise, keeps it for a term 



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