EDITORIAL 



Gifford Pinchot 



THE sudden act of dismissal by 

 which Gifford Pinchot, the builder 

 of the United States Forest Service, 

 was removed from the office he has 

 raised to so high a level of dignity and 

 usefuness, left the people stunned. It 

 is the reward and the peril of such 

 creators as Mr. Pinchot has been that 

 they become so closely identified with 

 their office that the people can hardly 

 understand their severance from it. 



We do not propose to discuss the 

 merits of the dismissal. Every con- 

 ceivable view of that has been expressed 

 and people may take their choice. We 

 may concede that the gage was thrown 

 down by the forester so defiantly that it 

 must have been taken up by the Presi- 

 dent We may even suppose that Mr. 

 Pinchot, who knows official Washing- 

 ton thoroughly, may have expected and 

 courted the action that came so swiftly. 

 He has entered a great fight ; the official 

 harness may have galled ; he could not 

 resign under existing circumstances; 

 but he could secure relief and freedom 

 to carry on the campaign by this bold 

 stroke. Opinions may differ as to the 

 wisdom of his course, but no one can 

 doubt that his act was a brave one and 

 his purpose honest. On the other hand, 

 we must concede that his provocation 



was great. 



Whatever its merits, this controversy 

 has been swept into the great fog-bound 

 region of politics and personalities, and 

 since this is the case, in order that we 

 may see more clearly, there are certain 

 things that no American citizen should 

 allow himself to forget. It is easy 

 enough to criticize individual acts and 

 errors of judgment in any man who has 

 done great things. Unfortunately, we 

 are not always so ready to take full 

 measure of the good things in his 

 record. 

 5 



Let it not be forgotten, then, that 

 Gififord Pinchot, who might have en- 

 joyed life easily, who might have had 

 all the fruits of the society tree passed 

 down to him, has elected to be one of 

 the hardest working citizens of this re- 

 public, giving himself heart and soul 

 to a cause in which he believed, to a 

 work he loved, because it was a great 

 work, and that he has labored year in 

 and year out with ceaseless devotion in 

 this cause, and with an ever-widening 

 knowledge of its need and its possi- 

 bilities. 



He was the first American to adopt 

 the profession of forestry, which we 

 now know to be one of the first in use- 

 fulness, and for which we are now 

 educating young men as fast as our in- 

 creasing facilities will allow but hardly 

 fast enough to meet the growing de- 

 mand. His contagious enthusiasm and 

 quality of leadership has been a potent 

 factor in this rise of his chosen pro- 

 fession into favor. 



He entered the Forest Service, then 

 a humble division of a somewhat 

 humble Government department, a di- 

 vision that had one room and five or 

 six employees, and built it up to its 

 present proportions, with over two 

 thousand men employed in the adminis- 

 tration of the National Forests alone. 

 The Service has the administration of a 

 vast public domain of 190,000,000 acres, 

 presenting problems of stupendous 

 magnitude, which have been grappled 

 with successfully for the most part If 

 some mistakes have been made in single 

 cases, who should cavil at it? Is there 

 any private of Governmental business 

 of similar magnitude the whole frame- 

 work of which has had to be created in 

 a few years from the ground up in 

 which mistakes could not be found? Is 

 it often that such a business shows as 

 few mistakes as the Forest Service? 



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