EDITORIAL 



NEW OCCASIONS TEACH NEW DUTIES 



^^i^HE forest commission believes that it has brought the tree interests 

 IJ of the state to a point where it is necessary to go forward more rapidly 

 ^**^ or to risk drifting slowly backward." 



This quotation from a journal in an eastern state suggests a condition 

 which comes inevitably in every forward movement. The first steps of agita- 

 tion are comparatively easy. They seem difficult indeed to the pioneers in a 

 movement, but those who have been through the experience know that the 

 fresh enthusiasm of a new enterprise, working with elementary and com- 

 paratively obvious facts, has a much easier task to arouse the people to make 

 beginnings than when it becomes necessary to settle down to the steady, long 

 pull which is demanded for ultimate successful accomplishment. Then there 

 must be patient, scientific examination of actual conditions. The easy oration 

 and generalized appeal to patriotism have done their work and must be laid 

 aside for less pyrotechnic labor. This is particularly diflQcult for the American 

 people. Their energy and enthusiasm, especially for a new thing, are bound- 

 less; but it is not easy for them to give the patient and persistent study and 

 careful development to a great problem in which the German and the Japanese 

 excel. President Taft expressed this tersely at the American Forestry Asso- 

 ciation dinner, when he said that we want to begin a thing at night and have 

 it done the next morning. 



How common is the story of apparently brilliant success in the first 

 stages of a movement, success that fires the workers with enthusiasm and in- 

 spires popular interest. And how difficult it is oftentimes to live up to this 

 apparently brilliant record in the later stages of the same movement. The 

 real danger point of any institution or organization for progress is the possible 

 dead center which it reaches when the popular interest ceases to be fired by 

 striking achievement, but when the real solid work has to be done and patience, 

 knowledge, and training are wanting in the leaders. We have a way of settling 

 back and resting on our oars after a brief spurt which very often endangers 

 a race. 



This generalization applies in a marked degree to the whole forestry move- 

 ment and to all the organizations connected with it, not only in the state 

 from which the journal above quoted comes, but throughout the whole United 

 States. A wonderful work has been done in the last twenty years, a work that 

 compares favorably with the achievements in forestry in any country in the 

 same length of time. But now we have reached the point when we must study 

 this great problem in all its detail ; when we are meeting practical difliculties 

 of its application to the conditions of business and of everyday life; when 

 many of the accepted methods of our people must be overturned in order to 

 develop forestry along the widest and most successful lines for the good of 

 the nation at large. Now is the time, if ever, when every individual citizen of 

 the United States who cares for the success of the forestry movement should 

 lend his whole support to the governmental agencies and to those organiza- 

 tions which are striving to develop the work of the pioneers into a complete 

 and finished product. 



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